I am disgusted too… Not fixing this for so long tell me enough about Plex. I am not gonna renew my Plex Pass membership anymore until they fix this. Looking for other alternatives. Enough is enough. I won’t let them treat me like this. Begging them for this basic feature.
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Any chance this would get more attention as a new feature request?
Interesting idea. I think we would need a lot of people liking it though. I’m not sure we are a big enough group to get any more attention than we are already getting.
Happy 21st monthly anniversary everyone. It was 21 months ago that I started this thread. So there’s something to celebrate. 
Okay, back to work…
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…and probably two candles very soon! 
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Been a few weeks… So, I thought I’d talk about MrMC today, which will lead to a worry about Plex. After getting the settings correct, I started checking out my music. It all sounded good, except for my up mixes. I use a program called SpecWeb to up mix stereo recording. My receiver can do it automatically, but SpecWeb does a great job creating discrete mixes. The only issue is that sometimes there are artifacts in the sound. This is most pronounced on my computer, but by the time I play it in my car or on JRiver, they sound very good. I don’t understand enough about how it all works to explain it, but it is what it is. So, back to MrMC… The up mixes sound horrible. They are unlistenable. But on JRiver they sound great. I should explain that JRiver does not run through my Apple TV. It is a stand alone computer with a cable to the receiver. The audio goes directly to the receiver and the video goes to the TV. My concern is that when/if Plex gets their multi channel audio act together, will they do it right, or will it end up like MrMC? After all this time (over 20 months), it would be horrible to finally have multi channel support, but not be able to play all of my music. That’s my rant for today. We need to start planning our 2 year anniversary soon.
Interesting thread here; I’ve been doing 5.1 FLAC with no apparent issue for a couple of months now.
I found this thread as I am now just having my first issue, but I believe the problem is with AppleTV and not Plex (I’m willing to be wrong here).
I have many 5.1 DVDs/Blu-rays that I have ripped and converted different 5.1 and Stereo audio streams (DTS, DTS-HD, ATMOS, AC3, PCM) to FLAC no issue until now.
I’m working on Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here Blu-rays (LPCM 5.1), and the same methods (and many other new test scenarios) are not working.
The resultant FLAC file, regardless of the method, only appears to play 2.1 audio. I take the exact same files and put them on a USB drive, and plug & in my receiver, and they play the 5.1 FLAC with no apparent issue.
The source MKV “video” plays in both the AppleTV Plex app and browser, but the Dashboard reports a transcode “English (PCM 5.1) → AAC - Transcode”. When I play from the Plex app on my PC I do get “English (PCM 5.1) → Direct Play”
How can I narrow the source of the issue down here? What logs or references in logs should I look at?
My goal is a 5.1 FLAC file to add to my Plex music library as I do with all my other audio media.
I really appreciate any help you can provide.
This thread has been going on for almost two years, so I don’t expect you to read through all of it. But, here is what you missed. Plex has acknowledged that multi channel audio files do not work on Apple TVs right now. They have, on a list somewhere, a plan to rebuild the audio engine to better support ATV and other platforms. Where is it on the list? We have no idea. Having said that, the only apparent solution within Plex at the moment is to convert your audio files to video formats, which will fool the system and allow you to play them. Is that a reasonable idea? For most of us, the answer is no. Outside of Plex you can use VLC or the paid version of MrMC on your ATV to support playing the files. They don’t do a very good job. Outside of ATV, I highly recommend JRiver. But you need a HDMI cable to go from your media server to your receiver in order for that to work and then you use an app on your phone to play the music. Not a great solution either. That’s all we got so far. I started this thread at the end of May, 2019. We are no where near a solution yet (as far as I know). 
@DaveBinM, any new developments?
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2.3 - 2.4 - 2.5 - 2.5.1 - 2.6 - 2.7 - 2.8 - 2.9 - 2.10 - 2.10.1 - 2.11 - 2.11.1 - 2.11.2 - 2.12 - 2.13 - 2.14 - 2.15 - 2.16 - 2.17 - 2.18 - 2.18.1 - 7.0 - 7.1 - 7.1.1 - 7.2 - 7.2.1 - 7.3 - 7.3.1 - 7.4 - 7.5 - 7.5.1 - 7.6 - 7.6.1 - 7.7 - 7.9 - 7.10 - 7.11 - 7.12 - 7.13 - 7.14 - 7.15 …
This is simply the impressive, and probably not finished, list of the 41 Apple TV app updates we’ve seen go by without resolving this multichannel sound issue, this since the fateful 2.2 update that apparently caused it.
Could someone at PLEX (maybe DaveBinM whose last intervention on this thread was in December 2020) at least tell us if there is any will to solve this problem one day or at least give us an order of magnitude of how much longer we’ll have to wait?
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I can’t provide an ETA, but I’m continuing to poke on this internally
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Since others have mentioned a few alternatives (in which they each have their own imperfections) I have another alternative to suggest. I purchased a 2020 Samsung TV, Q80T, and downloaded the Plex app from their App Store. The TV is hooked up to a receiver and 5.1 FLAC files play perfectly, although I haven’t found an option for gapless. One other issue, 4.0 files do not play correctly. But I can say for sure, it is nice to be able to play 5.1 music again.
Are you actually getting it in Plex? And, are you sure that you are getting the real 5.1 and not an upmix. It looks like that TV can upmix the sound. It seems weird that you can get a 5.1 and not a 4.0. That is very strange. If that is working, that’s great, although changing out the TV and not getting gapless audio would be a no go for me.
Hi Bruce. Yes, I start Plex on the Samsung TV (I’m not using the Apple TV box) and navigate to my music library. Select an album and hit play. My receiver is not the most current, it doesn’t have hdmi arc input. So I am using the digital audio out from the tv. Once the song starts playing the receiver shows the speaker configuration being utilized (5 speakers, subwoofer and lfe). It is not upmixing. ‘Something’ by the Beatles has beautiful back channel separation. But as I mentioned on a 4.0 source (Chicago quad), it plays in stereo, the receiver shows left, right and subwoofer only. Hope this helps.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Hi folks,
I just dedicated some time to try to understand where my problem on multichannel FLAC’s on Plex is relying and I discover this hugely long (and actually quite funny, especially for Bruce contrbution :-)) thread.
I’m commenting just to increase the number of users affected by this problem and join the community of happy Plex movie users and Plex unhappy multichannel music users.
I tried to go through the entire thread (sorry I’ve read a lot but didn’t manage to go through all of it) and I randomly saw comments about multichannel FLAC files “not playing” and others “not playing right”.
Can I know more about the “not playing right” ones?
My case is this: I have few quadraphonic FLAC files (Pink Floyd ones… yeaaah) that play on 2 channels only, but the weird thing is that they play on “Front left+Center” (cannot understand if downmixed or simply just the 2 front out of the 4 channels).
Is this also your experience?
Small update: I managed to play a taylored made 5.1 FLAC file with 6 distinct reconizable channels and it correctly played only the Front Left channel in the FL speaker, it wrongly played the Front Right channel in the Center speaker and it muted all the other four channels (so no downmix).
Cheers
That’s pretty much what happens. In the early days of this, when I had a lot more hope 
I would play Time to Kill from UK’s live release. All of the vocals are in the center channel. I would know within seconds whether they had fixed the problem because there should be a vocal coming out of the center channel.
So, just to get you completely up to date, here is what we know… Multi channel audio is broken on Plex on the Apple TV. Plex’s plan is to rebuild the audio player from scratch. Meanwhile, other streaming devices may or may not work. The only possible workaround in Plex with ATV is to convert your files to video format and fool Plex into thinking they are movies, and therefore properly playing the audio. If you have a lot of files, that is a pain in the butt and you lose things like gapless audio. The alternative to all of this is to use other apps. VLC and MrMC seem to work, but their interface and quality is not nearly as good as Plex. My personal workaround has been to use JRiver. But, JRiver does not actually run on ATV. It goes directly to your receiver from a computer.
And that is, I believe, everything you need to know right now. The two year anniversary is coming up next month. I expect cake!
bruce
Thank you for the summary Bruce.
I created a FLAC file with Audacity, following the AC-3 Specs order (FL, FR, C, LFE, BL, BR)
This morning I tried with VLC and actually for me it doesn’t work either.
This is the outcome:
FL Track => FL Speaker (Correct)
C Track => C Speaker (Correct, better than Plex where it is muted)
LFE Track => Muted (WRONG, same as Plex)
FR Track => C Speaker (WRONG, same as Plex)
BL Track => FL Speaker (Kind of wrong, downmixed to front, a small step forward compared to Plex where it is muted)
BR Track => C Speaker (WRONG, downmixed AND on the wrong channel, in Plex is muted).
So, despite I’ve read in some reply that VLC has a completely different player, somehow separated from the ATV one (reason why you’re pushing Plex to do the same), to me the issue relies on ATV rather than on Plex (I saw the punctual updates from Scotch6468 on the ATV tvOS). Am I missing something?
As far as you know, is there a similar thread on some official ATV forum?
Cheers
Marco
Further update: I discovered (horrified) that also the STEREO FLAC files are played in FL+C!!
The good news is that if I force the receiver in “Stereo” they go back to normal (or at least this is what it looks like from an initial quick test).
It is actually the other way around: to check if the channels are well mapped, I need to “force” the receiver in going to “Pure Audio/Direct Audio”, otherwise it automatically goes in Stereo mode.
And this, I believe, is the key point: when I play a stereo sources “something” tells my receiver to go in stereo mode. Same for the Dolby Digital/DTS, when I play a movie with DD/DTS “something” tells the receiver to go in 5.1 mode, with the difference that with my receiver I cannot manually “force” the 5.1 mode.
As result I think that the whole problem is reduced to “Plex needs to tell the receiver that the given track is Dolby Digital or DTS” so that is then the receiver interpreting the tracks with the correct mapping (I know, maybe I’m writing something you understood already almost 2 years ago :-))
It does work correctly using MrMC, so maybe there is something about your file. Would love to see it.
I haven’t looked onto ATV’s forums because… I just don’t think there is anything there. But maybe I’m wrong. I do believe this started either with a Plex update or an ATV update. Either way, I believe it is solvable within an app.
