NAS to iTunes

Posted by: Bryce Curdy on 27 November 2017

I hope Richard will allow this, as it might be perceived as more relevant to an iTunes forum. At the same time, I cannot be the first poster who previously had a large iTunes library but now has a Naim streamer (Atom in my case) but still wishes to use an Apple portable MP3 player (iPod 6thG 120GB) for car and holiday use.

I have a large FLAC library on my NAS drive and a large MP3 library on iTunes with plenty of music being in one of the libraries but not the other. The music that is in iTunes but not my NAS drive includes purchased media but is mostly non-purchased. I am in the process of copying from iTunes to my NAS drive but time consuming due to metadata corrections.

Once I've done this I would like to batch convert the FLAC music using dPpoweramp and add this to the copied MP3 music to create an entirely new iTunes library that would completely replace the existing one. Would be massively grateful for any advice about how to do this painlessly.

Three supplementary questions:

Can I copy purchased iTunes music to my NAS drive?

Does it matter that my iTunes library is stored on an external hard drive?

And (possibly related to above) what happens to.album artwork?

Posted on: 27 November 2017 by Adam Zielinski

1. You can do whatever you want with the files - they are yours

2. No - it does not. It’s actually better. Just make sure you change the default location in the settings, to the NAS drive. Best is to erase other libraries and re-point your iTunes to the new one and let it load up again. Just make sure you switch of a function ‘organise automatically’ - otherwise iTunes would start changing the sequence of albums on your NAS, whcih is what you don’t want or need.

3. Album artwork should be embeded in the MP3 files.

Posted on: 28 November 2017 by Motel Blues

A couple of points that may or may not be relevant:

iTunes can’t handle FLAC, but it can handle ALAC, the Apple equivalent.

iTunes can create MP3s on the fly of higher-res files stored in its library when syncing to a portable device.

You might consider ripping everything to ALAC and only converting to MP3 on syncing, or even try ALAC in your iPod if the storage space isn’t to much of a concern.

Posted on: 28 November 2017 by Filipe

Motel Blues posted:
A couple of points that may or may not be relevant:
iTunes can’t handle FLAC, but it can handle ALAC, the Apple equivalent.
iTunes can create MP3s on the fly of higher-res files stored in its library when syncing to a portable device.
You might consider ripping everything to ALAC and only converting to MP3 on syncing, or even try ALAC in your iPod if the storage space isn’t to much of a concern.

As far as I remember Naim support ALAC and I remember using my iTunes library with a Uniti 2 before abandoning Naim streamers for classic range without a streamer at all. Of course people will tell you that FLAC is better even though both are supposed to be lossless. If there is a SQ difference it can only be because the on-the-fly real-time decompression has imperfections. Some think the Chord parallel/pipeline processor is better.

Naim recommend wav, which iTunes also supports. dbPoweramp may give you what you want. I wished the UnitiServe (US) would create libraries of every format needed. Alas no! The Core does less at the moment than the US.

I find MP3 320kbs quite good for the car, but don’t know what bps Apple produces automatically.

You need to decide what works for you. I gave up and decided CDX2 plus nDAC/XPSDR is much better SQ.

Phil

Posted on: 28 November 2017 by Iver van de Zand

You might want to consider visting the iLounge.dot.com website to find some useful tips managing your library

Posted on: 28 November 2017 by Peter1480

The Onkyo HF player app will play flac on an ipod touch 6, you do have to pay for the app though its not free.