I have Kodi installations on multiple devices, some on Android and some on Windows 10 and 11. All my media sources are pointing to the same NAS location, using the local network IP address, like “smb://user:[email protected]/Music” and that’s exactly the same for all my Kodi installations. I’m using MySQL for my libraries. That MySQL server is also running on the same NAS device, which is some old PC running TrueNAS OS.
I have some network shares set up on my Windows 11 machine, to prepare my music files the way I like them, with album arts etc. The same location that is listed as media source in Kodi as “smb://user:[email protected]/Music” is mapped as a network M: drive on my Windows 11 PC, as “\\192.168.1.10\Music”.
Here is the problem that I see:
If I scan for new music using Kodi on Windows 11, it’s finding all new music files properly and I can play them on that Windows PC, but my Android devices are skipping over each newly added song without playing a single one of them. I knew that this means the file location wasn’t found, so I connected my MySQL client to see what went wrong. Somehow the Windows PC didn’t recognize that there is already a registered path to the folder I’m scanning (which was registered as “smb://freenas/Music/Artist”). My Windows PC added “M:\Artist” to the path table and linked all newly scanned songs under that new path ID. I don’t have any reference in my Kodi installation to the “M:\” and I have no idea why the scan did that. Obviously, my Android devices don’t have the “M:\Artist” as the accessible path, so they can’t play those songs. After updating path references in the song table to use the old “smb” path id (using MySQL client), all my devices can now play those songs, including the Windows 11 PC that caused the problem in the first place.
I’m OK with IP address being converted to the computer name, like “192.168.1.10” being changed to “freenas” (although I don’t see the need for it), but I can’t see why would a network-friendly media location path be converted to the one that’s local to a single machine.
I will say again that all my Kodi installations have the exact same settings in their XML files. My Windows installs are using Kodi in a portable mode.
I’d love to scan my libraries using much faster device, but for now I guess I’d have to do my scans using Android devices.
My question is: Is this local path saving logic something that can be changed somewhere in settings or setting files (and I missed it), or is this one of those “unwanted features”?