Say you’ve got a network share with all your music on it. Adding it to a Windows 8 library so you can access it from Windows Music seems like it’ll be simple, right? Well, not quite.

Mapping the network drive and attempting to add it gives you this error:

This network location can’t be included because it is not indexed. Well, that’s helpful.

To get around this, you can make the folder available offline, but this assumes you’ve got enough storage on your local computer to sync the entire damn thing over – something I’m assuming you don’t have, which is why you’ve got a NAS folder storing all this content.

So the alternate way is to trick Windows in to thinking the folder is actually local with the mklink command. First, create a folder on your local computer, for example Libraries or Shares, then create folders for each of the libraries you want to create. For example:

 

You could also create these folders in Windows explorer, but I prefer the powershell route. Old Linux habits die hard.

Next, right click and select properties on the library you’re interested in adding things to, and add the relevant folder you’ve just created.

Now open an elevated command prompt or powershell and delete the folder with the rmdir command:

Finally, use mklink to create a symbolic link to the network folder (remember, the command prompt or powershell needs to be run as administrator)

 

Note that the commands are slightly different for powershell and a command prompt:

cmd: mklink /d localfolder \\server\remotefolder

powershell: cmd /c mklink /d localfolder \\server\remotefolder

Basically the command is only available from the standard windows command prompt, but you can call the command prompt from within powershell to run legacy applications.

The folders should now all exist, and be added to Windows Music: