I’m going nuts trying to get my music to show up in the music library.
I’m new to Plex and Linux. I just revived my 10 year-old HP desktop (AMD Athlon II x4, 64bit) by adding a new SSD as the boot drive while retaining the original HDD as secondary storage. Installed Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS, installed Plex Media Server (whatever was current two days ago). My entire goal is to have remote access to about 70GB of music I have stored on this system HDD. That’s all I’m trying to use Plex for.
When I go to create a new library, I’m able to navigate to the music but when I click through to the end nothing happens. It just says There are no items in this library.
I’ve tried navigating to the location on my original (NTFS) HDD (/HP/Users/Paul/Music). I’ve tried copy/pasting all the music onto the new (ext4) SSD where the OS is installed (/home/paul/Tunes/Music). I originally had it in the /media folder but moved it out after reading in this forum.
I’m sure a lot of the file names are not formatted correctly but I know that some of them are and it finds nothing.
I tried changing permissions but I’m still not sure if I did that correctly. The fact that literally nothing is showing up in the library makes me think that is likely the problem. I’ve read all of the information I can find in these forums and elsewhere and I don’t know what else to do.
No Linux guy here, but judging from your path name, I think you didn’t grant Plex access permissions to your media.
On Linux, Plex is running under its own user account. It is not using your user account (which automatically has access permissions to your media files).
I agree with Otto. When I made the switch to Linux, file permissions were the single most common cause of this kind of frustration. This help page should be useful. Great info on Linux permissions in general, but toward the bottom you’ll find instructions to set up what Plex needs: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200288596-linux-permissions-guide/
Thank you for your help! It’s good to hear that you think it’s a permissions issue because I don’t know what else it could be. I’ve already read through that guide but now that I’m more confident this is the problem I’ll go back through it more carefully…just as soon as I get my system back up and running. There’s suddenly no video output. I might have to find another old dusty desktop and start over.
You’re using NTFS? - sudo apt install ntfsprogs ntfs-3g - if you haven’t done so already. One of these won’t exist so remove it from the list. Different distros use different package names.
By default media is mounted under /media and is exclusive to your username. Getting Plex to see it while in /media is a tough task for a newcomer to Linux.
I recommend this procedure. Please take your time with it. Don’t skip any steps. I provide examples of NTFS and EXT filesystems.
Read slowly and don’t be afraid to read a few times. It’s a heavy read for a newcomer
Thanks for the comments. I’ve already learned a lot from reading your other posts but a few things have me stumped.
The NTFS comes from a drive that was in a previous Win 7 system. That’s where the majority of my music is stored. I have tried creating a library directly from this location and it didn’t work. So, then I moved everything to the new SSD drive where Ubuntu is installed. That also didn’t work.
Is it better to leave the music on the NTFS HDD or move it over to the ext4 SSD? There is room in both places.
I tried following the instructions in the link you provided a day or two ago. I couldn’t figure out if the instructions should apply to the music that is on the SSD with the OS, or if that procedure only applies to media that is on a separate drive.
I initially put the music on the SSD into the /media folder but after reading your posts I moved it to a new folder I created called Tunes. The path is still under my home folder though…/home/paul/Tunes/Music. Is there anything wrong with that location?
So,…funny thing happened. My old HP system crashed, no video output from the MB, so I decided to buy a used Optiplex desktop to replace it. I pulled the SSD (containing Ubuntu and my media) from the HP system, plugged it in to the first SATA connecter in the Optiplex, booted it, and with out changing anything else, I was able to add a library in PMS and pull in all my music. Now it’s working fine. This makes no sense to me, unless maybe I just needed to reboot to let some settings take affect.
