question about sharing music files.

[masterpc]

Hi,
I'm planning to move all music files to my NAS including .mp3 and .flac.

I have two macs and one window machine, and I would like to share music files between computers.

I'm not really a fan of iTunes and I don't use it much right now.
I'm still using winamp on window machine while listening music.

What I want to do is keeping music directory structure just like...
A, B, C ... Z directories and artist dirs inside them.

If I make a iTunes server (it's firefly?), can I keep those directory structure?
I have no idea about iTunes Library and iTunes server.

What is the best option to do that?

Any advice would be appreciated.


Thank you.

 

[iJimmyC]

Here's been my issue with the "iTunes server" on any setup, not simply FreeNas.

It's technically not serving anything!

What it does is allow your iTunes library to connect to the data and iTunes makes it look just like a shared library, (if you connect one mac to the other, in iTunes, you'll see what I mean) and this is very limited in it's viewing and sorting option..

Hence it simply shows up in iTunes as a massive list of tracks, and not as a library of music (as it does normally if the music is stored on the computer its' self).

What I've been doing is storing the music files in a Media - Music (folder structure) on FreeNas, THEN configured iTunes to NOT import the tracks (or media files of any kind) on to the local drive, and this simply allows iTunes to store a 'referential file' which basically means that all of the content is stored on the FreeNas drive, but when I open iTunes on my mac I can access all of the content...

I hope this makes sense. I think it would work the same way for winamp on windows. Simply drag and drop the files into winamp from the music folder on the FreeNas drive.

This allows you to store the music in any fashion that you like.... (for instance, I tried, just to see if it gets rearranged by iTunes on the FreeNas drive, to simply have a massive .mp3, .aac collection all in the one folder unsorted, and dragged that all into iTunes, because I had all of the metadata for the music already done, iTunes sorted it correctly within it's own window, however, all of the files were still in the one big messy folder...