Win8 as an HTPC?

I wanted to give Win8 a try for an HTPC as I thought it would be a fresh change and something that would work fairly easily using the WMC remote.

Having a few issues, the first being libraries.

You can no longer add a network location to a library. Libraries must contain indexed locations and network locations cannot be indexed. This presents a huge problem when all the media is stored on a storage device.

I copied some content locally to the relevant libraries for testing purposes. First tested out the music app and found that you can only sort by album, not by artist on the main music page.

Is anyone else using win8 as an htpc, what other options do I have?

Are you sure you can't add networked locations to a library? I was able to do that just fine for my music collection.

I've had no trouble adding network locations to libraries on Windows 8.

You might want to make sure the machine that's hosting the SMB shares has indexed the folders. Windows will serve up its index over the network on-request so that remote machines don't have to re-index the folder over and over.

Unknown-One said:

I've had no trouble adding network locations to libraries on Windows 8.

You might want to make sure the machine that's hosting the SMB shares has indexed the folders. Windows will serve up its index over the network on-request so that remote machines don't have to re-index the folder over and over.

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I was having a similar issue. Can you tell me how to do what you are suggesting?
TIA