Hi everyone,
I’ve been evaluating Plex for a while now, to see if it’s a viable alternative to iTunes syncing for me on iOS. What I would like to achieve is to have all of my music library available to me (8,000+ files), with the ability to sync a substantial amount to my devices locally via playlists.
It seems that Plex ticks all the boxes so I took the plunge this weekend with a Plex pass and scanned my entire library into PMS running on a Synology DS213j NAS.
Although the whole system seems to work, it is generally pretty sluggish and not great for real world usage in my opinion. The CPU usage on the NAS goes to 100% whenever I do anything in a Plex client, syncing seems to be very slow / hit and miss and some large playlists time out when loading on my iOS client.
I get the idea that the Synology is just not up to the task so I’m willing to switch hardware. I’m looking for some recommendations - does anyone else use Plex for just music?
I have a spare Core Duo 1.66 (not Core 2 Duo) Mac Mini lying around which I could probably install Ubuntu on and get PMS working. Not sure it it’s worth the effort though. Other than that I’ve seen people use a Raspberry Pi 3 - I’m not sure that will be up to the job either. Other than that, I guess there’s an i3 / i5 Intel NUC. Maybe that’s overkill though?
I’d like to set PMS to do no audio transcoding at all as my network infrastructure is up to the task. It seems the highest bitrate file PMS allows to sync however is 320kbps (for some reason) - so I guess my hardware would need to do some transcoding.
Apologies for meandering on… suggestions gratefully received!
IMHO/IME, I would not use Plex if I just wanted a music experience. I would look into something like subsonic or something to that effect.
@trumpy81 said:
If you have PMS installed on the DS213j, then for video you will not have any transcoding at all. The DS213j simply does not have the CPU power for transcoding and you will find that most NAS don’t have the power when using Plex. File transfers are also slow because of the very low power of the CPU in that NAS.
However, if you have a PC, install PMS on that and simply use the NAS for storage. That would be a more than capable setup provided the PC has a quad core i5 or better CPU for video transcoding duties. If for audio only, then just about any CPU would do the job.
For audio only, then even the NAS running PMS should provide sufficient power to send audio remotely if need be. The catch there is wireless networking. You really need to have a wired network, which can restrict your usage to local only, but if you ‘sync’ content to your mobile devices then you should not have too many issues with audio playback.
Hi, thanks for the reply. Yes, I’m happy that PMS on the Synology will not do video particularly well, and with no transcoding - hence my usage is music only. What I’m finding is that the Synology is not up to this job. Notably it freezes up when loading large playlists. I’m pretty sure this is because it is struggling to serve up all the artwork quickly enough. I’m hoping that moving onto faster/dedicated hardware would solve this issue.
Not sure what you mean with “the catch here is wireless networking”. Do you mean if my Synology is connected to the router via wifi? I have it connected via Ethernet. There shouldn’t be any data bottleneck with my home internet connection or my remote wifi / 4G connection on my mobile device. For music anyway, even at Apple Lossless data rates.
@drinehart said:
IMHO/IME, I would not use Plex if I just wanted a music experience. I would look into something like subsonic or something to that effect.
Hi, yes I had a good look at Subsonic / Madsonic. I came to the conclusion that Plex was better supported and had more active development. I think I may well go back and have another look at Madsonic now though.
Thanks, I’m satisfied that it isn’t any networking issues that are causing me my Plex problems. I’m able to directly stream 720 video from the Synology to my phone over a 4G network fairly easily (not using Plex) - so I’m confident it’s Plex running on the Synology that is my issue here.
Installing PMS on my desktop isn’t an option, so I think my next step is to try it on my old Mac Mini. I was hoping to get confirmation that it worked well on an rPi 3 so I guess that would be my next stop. Failing that, I may well have to go for an i3 NUC.
