I have a couple networked drives that I want to make available to a Windows 7 library. Both have an absurd amount of data on them, which is why they are on a networked drive in the first place and why the “always available offline” option is, well, absurd. These are servers (media and other data files) that need to be available to multiple computers, so directly connecting them via USB is not an option. Since they are NAS devices, they are most likely Linux-based, which means adding a Windows 7-exclusive option is also not possible.
I’ve seen a couple workarounds that involve monkeying with Windows Media Player, but that doesn’t seem like it would work for the range of files that we want to make available to other libraries.
I am quite surprised you can’t just assign the networked drive a drive letter, and then use that drive letter as a directory to be monitored in Media Player. I’ve done that on earlier versions of Media Player…
Thanks. The drives are mapped network-wise. And I think monitoring the directory via Media Player is part of the workaround I’ve seen.
But I rarely use Media Player (Real Alternative’s Media Player Classic and Winamp do most of my viewing), and there are large numbers of non-media files that I want available in different libraries. This isn’t just serving music, photos, and video, there are also Quark files, PDFs, Word documents, etc., that should be accessible from the libraries.
They are accessible the long way (via drive letter, favorites, etc.), but I’d like to be able to take advantage of Win 7 Libraries features, if possible.
Just a head’s up, every time I had a network drive as part of a library, I had terrible performance issues. Stuff like file transfers taking minutes instead of seconds, explorer not refreshing after actions, crashes.
I’d attach the NAS as a network drive. That’s what I do with mine.