Alright I have tried everything and anything I can find to make this work via anyway possible and so far have had no luck. And yes I have searched here and at volumio and everywhere in between. My USB is NTFS so on the Mac (and Pi) its a fuse based filesystem.
I want to keep my USB drive attached to the Mac instead of directly to the Pi. I have not been able to make cifs/smb work at all. I even tried as a test to get to a Mac folder on the Mac and couldnt make that work either. The ONLY thing I got working was to make the folder on the Mac visible via NFS and that works, albeit its not the fastest stream. The problem with NFS is it does NOT work for fuseosx on the Mac.
I just tested sshfs and that seems to work as far as I can login and see my files....now just need to figure out how to get it in the UI....and then how to make it use keys, etc.
Help always appreciated