How do I tell bliss the location of my music if it's on network storage?

If you want to connect bliss to a music library that is stored on another computer (e.g. a NAS drive, a server, a music server with embedded storage, or anything else) both computers need to be connected to the network.

Note that wireless (“wifi”) connections are not recommended. Although modern wireless technologies are, in theory, very fast, they typically have a greater variance in connection quality, and therefore throughput. It’s almost always best to use a wired connection, if you can.

Windows

The simplest way is to specify a UNC path. A UNC path is of the form:

\\COMPUTER-NAME\SHARE-NAME

You can browse for UNC paths in Windows Explorer. Click Network to list connected computers, and computers that can share their storage. Double click the computer to reveal their shares. Click the path at the top of the Explorer window to copy and paste the UNC path. For example:

Here the UNC path is \\BORDEAUX\music. If we copy and paste that into bliss, bliss will read those files in the remote location:

![Pasting the UNC path into bliss’s setup field to connect bliss to a remote music library]https://www.blisshq.com/images/support/faq/install-first-use/networked-music-collection/paste-unc-bliss-setup.png)

Make sure you have the permissions to read/write from the path.

If you know the UNC path, another alternative is to ‘map’ the network storage to a drive. Here’s how to map a network drive on Windows XP, here’s how to do it on Windows 7 and here’s how to do it on Windows 8

macOS

On Mac, use Finder to Connect to Server. Then check the /Volumes folder for your network drive.

You can also mount the network storage to a location on your filesystem.

In recent versions of macOS, bliss might run in a sandbox. This is macOS’s way of restricting apps in the event they are compromised and may damage files in your system. By default, bliss should be able to read your entire filesystem, but in some cases network volumes may be restricted.

To allow bliss to read network volumes, open System Preferences > Security & Privacy and choose the Privacy tab. Choose Files and Folders from the left hand list, then in the right hand list find all occurrences of bliss and check Network Volumes:

Note that bliss might show as, simply, “bliss” or “bliss.app” depending on the way it has been run.

Linux

Finally, on Linux, you can also mount the network storage to a location on your filesystem.

Once the storage is ‘mapped’ or ‘mounted’, you should then be able to find it by using the ‘Browse’ button.