Downloads stuck / very slow / erratic behavior

Plex Media Server
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1

Hello and kind regards.

After messing around with Plex Media Server on my Raspberry Pi 5 with newest OS I am pretty clueless on following problem:

I am running more than 3000 music playlists on that Raspberry Pi. Now I want to re-organize all my music on that box which means I want to download every music file to my local Mac. Both machines are located in my home network solely running on ethernet connections (= no WiFi). Whenever trying to download especially large playlists ( more than one hour of playing time) with the Plex Web app or any other Plex app the downloads get stuck, some are not even downloading at all.

To be more exact:

Sometimes the download is starting. Nevertheless only some files within a playlist are downloaded at expected speed. Some others take very long to start at all. The bad thing: Sometimes the Plex App just crashes leaving the downloads incomplete. I tested this on two other Macs, same behavior. When trying to re-download the same list the 3 dot submenu doesn’t even offer the “Download” option anymore, I have to delete the former download and sometimes but not always this option reappears.

Although I set up to download the audio files in original state (all of them m4a-files) sometimes the files are transcoded to mp3. Furthermore some tracks do have odd naming. Instead of something like “The music is everywhere.m4a” and alike the same track is titled something like “- 2 -.mp3”. I more or less fixed that naming thing by downloading to HFS+ formatted drive instead of AFPS and checking the “case sensitive” box in the formatting app on Mac OS but this doesn’t solve the major problem.

For no obvious reason the Plex app crashes whenever my Macs turn their display off after some time (please note: My drives do not spin down during display shutdown, other downloads besides Plex work just right away). When restarting a Plex app for downloading sometimes the downloads restart by themselves, sometimes I have to restart them on my own. Nevertheless formerly deleted downloads are actually deleted now - after restarting the Plex Media Server or the complete Raspeberry Pi, they are not deleted immediately when doing so in the submenu of a playlist. By now I already deleted some tracks by mistake this way,

I also switched to IPv4 connections solely, same behavior. I hoped I could transfer my Plex Media Server from Raspberry Pi to Mac OS but by now it seems to be impossible. I can not download tons of audio tracks and Plex even is not able to export playlists alongside the integrated tracks.

I made a backup of all music files by copying the content of the Raspberry Pi SSDs directly to a HFS+ formatted Mac OS drive but as already mentioned I am missing the playlists (xml, txt or whatever). These would have been useful within Apple Music as I intend to manage the same audio tracks on my Mac. To be more exact: I want to set up Apple Music just the same like the Plex Media Server on my Raspberry Pi. Whenever this job is done I will re-set up Plex Media Server on my Mac hosting the same (!) playlists and tracks like Apple Music hopefully will do some day.

All this will not work as long as the download function is acting like mad. Any hint on this?

Thanks in advance a lot!

Jens

2

Using Plex’s download feature for what is basically a full backup of your media, is probably not the best way.

A direct file copy would be much faster. Either

  • install or activate an SMB or NFS server daemon on the Pi, then create a file share which you can access directly over your home network with Finder.
  • temporarily attach the media storage directly to your Mac. If it is formatted with a Linux file system, you may need to install a fitting driver software.

The former way is probably what you want to retain for future use as well, if you want to curate and prepare your media on the Mac, and then later transfer them to your Pi server.

There are also ways to export your Plex playlists as regular m3u playlist files. e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/plexamp/comments/1moe7nc/anyone_figure_out_how_to_export_playlists_from/

3

Thanks for Your reply, Otto.

As already mentioned I “cloned” the two directories containing the music files on the Raspberry Pi SSDs to one HFS formatted USB drive so I did not lose all tracks, transfer via SFTP or Samba would have taken too much time (but did work flawlessly as tested before some weeks ago). I also attached the SSDs directly to my Mac ( I am owning dedicated driver software).

Thanks for the link! I searched for something like that many many times, did not find that one. I will give it a try!

Jens

4

Only Windows…..

Is there any way to export playlists from within Linux (= on my Raspberry Pi Plex Media Server)? None of the solutions found on Reddit is working on Mac OS without dedicated emulation system or else like Parallels - and I refuse to use this on my major machine.

Jens

5

Syncra, linked from that thread is available for three OS’s.