Sonos + NAS + iTunes = Trouble

Sonos users who store their music on a NAS drive may be falling foul of an iTunes glitch.

This is what can happen. You point your Sonos Controller to the iTunes music library on your NAS and you do the same with iTunes. At the outset all may be neat and tidy but after a while things change, let's suppose you face a problem of some duplicate tracks.

How do you fix this? Naturally you'd go into iTunes and highlight the tracks in question, then delete them. When you do this everything will look neat and tidy, with just a single copy of the track / album. When you play music, the deleted tracks don't play, just as you'd expect.

Then you log into your music via Sonos, when you find that much to your surprise the duplicated tracks are still in your music library. How did this happen? Well, I recently found that the way iTunes operates in handling drives such as a NAS, is that in effect although the files leave the iTunes database the files remain on the NAS drive. My understanding is this applies only to files stored on a NAS (rather than an internal hard drive, or a directly connected USB drive).

How can you get round this. First, you should check to see if music you delete from iTunes does actually leave the NAS. I've only tried this on a couple of makes of NAS and so can't confirm it happens on all systems. If your music is being left behind by iTunes I think you have three options. One is to manually go through your folders on the NAS and manually delete the files that are duplicated. Second is to copy all your music off the NAS onto another (internal or directly connected HD), run iTunes against it, then copy your files back onto the NAS - but for a large library will take a long time using this method.

The third option is to use some software that recognises this and has a feature that directly deleted the tracks on the NAS you want to erase. The program is called Dupin and its available from Doug's Applescripts. You'll need to look at the options for deleting tracks and select the route for direct deletion without going via the trash can.