Help / Your library
Using a NAS or network share as your library
Vesari Stylus indexes a NAS or a Windows network share the same way it indexes a local drive. Everything that differs comes back to one fact: a share can vanish while the app is running.
The short answer
Point Add Folder at the share as you would at a local folder. Two things differ.
- New music on a share does not appear on its own. Press Rescan Library on the Tools tab after you add anything.
- A share that drops out marks its tracks offline, never deleted. Reconnect it, run one of the two recovery actions below, and they come back.
Mapped drive or network name
Both work. Register the share as a mapped drive letter (Z:\Music) or by its network name (\\nas\music); a path starting with \\ is recognised by its shape, a drive letter by asking Windows what kind of drive it is. Tracks on either carry a small globe badge in the track list, labelled Stored on a network share (NAS/SMB).
Register one route, not both. The same share reached two ways is one set of music under two names, and indexing both gives you every file twice: a library that looks full of duplicates. How scanning works covers overlapping folders; Why do I see two different "duplicate" numbers? explains the counts if it has already happened.
Network folders are not watched
Folders on your PC and on attached drives are watched while the app is open, so music dropped into one turns up a moment later. Network roots are deliberately left out: watching a share means re-checking the whole of it on a timer, which costs about as much as the rescan it would save.
After adding an album, press Rescan Library ("Find new and changed files") on the Tools tab. It indexes what is new, re-reads what changed and skips the rest, so it is far quicker than the first scan.
When the share is unreachable
Before walking a folder the app checks it can read it: up to three seconds per attempt, three attempts, half a second apart, so a brief blip is not mistaken for an outage. If it still cannot be reached:
- Every track under it is marked offline. The rows stay in your library with everything attached to them.
- The Tools tab names the offline folder.
- A network root already down when the app starts also raises a banner across the top reading Network share unavailable, naming the path, with a Retry button.
An offline track will not play, because the file cannot be read. Ask for one directly and playback stops with a message naming the folder and what to do; the tag editor says the same. Left to pick the next track itself, the app steps over offline entries. They stay in the queue rather than being dropped, since a reconnect brings them back.
The safety net goes deeper. A scan will not drop tracks for a folder it could not walk cleanly, and it never treats a missing network folder as a deleted one, so a share that disappears mid-scan cannot take your library with it.
Getting back online
Nothing clears the offline mark on its own. Reconnect the share, then do one of these:
- Open Library Health, find the row Offline / unreachable tracks and press Reconnect & re-probe. It re-checks every library folder, restores the tracks under the ones that answer, and reports how many came back.
- Or press Rescan Library, which clears the offline mark for folders that answer again and picks up anything added while the share was gone.
Do not run the app as administrator
Windows ties a mapped network drive to the sign-in token that created it, so an elevated app cannot see the Z: you mapped normally. To a scan that looks exactly like a dead share. (A network name is not a per-session mapping, so it is not affected.)
Vesari Stylus recognises the case and refuses to act on it. Rather than flag thousands of tracks offline it names the drive in a message, with a Rescan button beside it, and tells you to run the app normally. That is the fix: close it, start it the ordinary way, rescan. Your drive was fine all along.
Speed, and the rest of the differences
The first scan reads every file across the network once, so allow time on a large collection. After that a network root is read with more requests in flight than a local one, since round-trip latency rather than the disk is the limit. The library database is a local file, so none of that indexing traffic goes back over the share.
Tag writing on a share, and the path quirks a NAS permits that Windows does not, are covered in Tags and paths on a NAS. Tidying duplicates moves the extra copies into a quarantine folder on the same volume rather than deleting them, keeping the move a rename instead of a slow copy across the network: see Quarantine.
If the share is connected, opens fine in File Explorer, and the app still cannot see it, report it. Use Report a Bug under the Support tab in Settings and give the exact path you registered: Is this a bug? How to report it.