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Big Sur and External HDD

  • 28 April 2021
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Hi I’ve purchased a new Mac Mini with M1 and Big Sur.  I keep all my music on an external HDD.  This worked fine on my old Mac Pro running High Sierra (and still does).

In Big Sur on the M1 Mini :

  • iTunes uses the music library in ~\Users\[User Name]\Music\Music\Music Library.musiclibrary
  • My actual music files are in \Volumes\Data\iTunes\Music, which is an external HDD titled “Data”.

In the Sonos app, I added “My Music Folder” in “Music Library Settings”.  Seems to work, but when I attempt to play a playlist I get the following type of error message when I look into the console app:

//Mini Server/Music/Volumes/Data/iTunes/Music/Artist/Album/Song.mp3  failed. Error (404, 0x80000002)

 

As you can see, there appears an error in the file name as it appears to concatenate the file location of the iTunes music library “//Mini Server/Music” and the actual location of the file “Volumes/Data/iTunes/Music/Artist/Album/Song.mp3”.  Naturally, there is no such path.  This issue does not exist when running under the OS “High Sierra”, only on “Big Sur”.

If I put some songs in the standard music folder which iTunes normally uses, that is:

  • “~\Users\[User Name]\Music\Music\iTunes\Media\Artist\Album\Song.mp3”

Then the Music Library accesses it as:

  • “//Mini Server/Music/iTunes/Media/Artist/Album/Song.mp3”

In this instance, the file path makes sense.  But not when you use an external drive.

P.S. I believe //Mini Server/Music is an alias for “~\Users\[User Name]\Music\Music” or some such magic.

 

Any ideas?

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Best answer by James L. 28 April 2021, 17:42

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1 reply

James L.
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Hi @bdekok, welcome to the community.

 

Am I correct in assuming that this only happens when you attempt to play iTunes Playlists from the external drive? If so, this is due to the information contained in the iTunes Music Library XML file that iTunes creates. Sonos doesn’t alter the paths in any way, nor concatenate any file paths, it simply processes the contents of that XML to discover and index where the files are that are contained in the playlist(s). Therefore, if the XML file contains incorrect or dead file paths then the playlist will fail to start when triggered in the Sonos app. This can happen when iTunes is set to save downloaded tracks to one drive, but the files have then been moved to another drive. You should be able to fix this by changing the location where iTunes saves downloaded tracks (“iTunes Media Folder location”) through the iTunes preferences menu, force closing iTunes, and reindexing your Sonos Music Library.

Now, if this is happening outside of playlists as well (i.e. starting playback from the Albums or Artists container) then I suggest getting in touch with our customer care team who can take a closer look at what’s going on there.

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