Comment 15 for bug 751575

It's still not a bug, just a difference between what newer Linux users may expect and normal Ubuntu behavior.

When I posted in 2011 I was still new to using Linux on a system with multiple hard drives, though I had used it for longer on a single-drive system. Ubuntu, and Linux distros in general, are never going to auto-mount hard drives by default. The fact that Windows does so is an interesting difference (which wastes a lot of electricity) but it should not influence the Linux world.

The apparent banshee bug filed here has a simple explanation: the drive(s) containing the music in your banshee library must be mounted before you try to play your music. When people (including myself) noticed that re-scanning the library appeared to fix the problem, that was only true because they actually had to mount the drives before they scanned the library. And they perhaps did not notice that the drives became mounted as a necessary side-effect of going to look at them manually in their file manager.

Regardless of my innocence in 2011, I think it's clear that it's not banshee's problem if you want to play music located on a drive that is currently not mounted. Mounting and unmounting drives is an subject whose primary issues are power conservation and connection or disconnection from resources, allowing the facts of whether those resources are local or remote to be nicely abstracted over. That subject has nothing at all to do with a music player, which is only one of endless programs which may need to access content on a drive.

If banshee were to add the behavior of mounting drives when we go to play music from them, it would not be responsible to leave them mounted once banshee was closed, but it also would be wrong to unmount them on closing banshee because other applications may be using them. So there again these are two issues at right angles to each other.

@michaelchirico4: Even easier (for some at least) than one line in the terminal -- just open nautilus or whichever file manager you use and you'll see your drives listed in its left column. A single click on each one that you want to mount should get it going. The only waste of time or space with this is that you then have a file manager window open that you may not have needed. But the drive(s) will stay mounted if you close that window, or you can just minimize it based on the assumption that you might end up needing a file manager view during your session.

Even simpler than that is that Ubuntu can show your drives in the launcher so you can mount them from there. Unfortunately as of 14.04 there is no right-click option to mount a drive, so you just click it and this still opens a file manager window, but it does accomplish the mounting so that's one click less. Ideally the launcher view of drives would by default show (visually) their mount status and have a right-click option to mount.