by dzollman » Mon Jan 05, 2026 9:28 pm
After learning (from earlier in this thread) that VMWare Fusion is now free, I gave that a try over the holiday. I had no issues installing and running MM on the ARM version of Windows, other than slower performance, as you'd expect.
Getting MM to access media files stored locally on the Mac, from within the virtual machine, was a bit of a challenge. The files had to be made available through Mac file sharing, with SMB sharing turned on, then accessed from Windows as a shared network drive. Even though the MM developers recommended using the UNC path and NOT a mapped drive, I found that I couldn't reliably Add/Rescan files unless I first mapped the network folder to a drive letter—*even though* I did not use the drive letter, only the UNC path, within MM. I also gave my Mac a reserved IP address on my home router so that the UNC path will not change in the future. (There might be a better way to handle that with VMWare, but I didn't try.)
Finally, I'm not 100% sure of this, but Add/Rescan also seemed to work better if the folder I was scanning was not the root folder of the network drive (in other words, the file share needed to started at least 1 level higher, so that the path entered in Add/Rescan pointed to a subfolder of the network drive). That may or may not have been the issue since I was also playing with permissions and other settings at the time.
No matter what I tried, I could not get "Locate Moved/Missing Files" to work with the network drive. It always behaved as if the network drive was empty. In order to reuse my old database, after migrating it from MM4, I used the
SQL Editor addon to bulk update the IDMEDIA and SONGPATH data fields to reflect the new drive number and path to my "Music" folder.
This is by no means a solution for the casual user. And it will never be a substitute for an actual Mac version. But it was nice to use MM again after I stopped renewing Parallels years ago.
After learning (from earlier in this thread) that VMWare Fusion is now free, I gave that a try over the holiday. I had no issues installing and running MM on the ARM version of Windows, other than slower performance, as you'd expect.
Getting MM to access media files stored locally on the Mac, from within the virtual machine, was a bit of a challenge. The files had to be made available through Mac file sharing, with SMB sharing turned on, then accessed from Windows as a shared network drive. Even though the MM developers recommended using the UNC path and NOT a mapped drive, I found that I couldn't reliably Add/Rescan files unless I first mapped the network folder to a drive letter—*even though* I did not use the drive letter, only the UNC path, within MM. I also gave my Mac a reserved IP address on my home router so that the UNC path will not change in the future. (There might be a better way to handle that with VMWare, but I didn't try.)
Finally, I'm not 100% sure of this, but Add/Rescan also seemed to work better if the folder I was scanning was not the root folder of the network drive (in other words, the file share needed to started at least 1 level higher, so that the path entered in Add/Rescan pointed to a subfolder of the network drive). That may or may not have been the issue since I was also playing with permissions and other settings at the time.
No matter what I tried, I could not get "Locate Moved/Missing Files" to work with the network drive. It always behaved as if the network drive was empty. In order to reuse my old database, after migrating it from MM4, I used the [url="https://www.mediamonkey.com/addons/browse/item/sql-editor/"]SQL Editor[/url] addon to bulk update the IDMEDIA and SONGPATH data fields to reflect the new drive number and path to my "Music" folder.
This is by no means a solution for the casual user. And it will never be a substitute for an actual Mac version. But it was nice to use MM again after I stopped renewing Parallels years ago.