I have nearly a TB of ripped CD content stored in my iTunes for Windows library. I ripped all my disks with the Apple Lossless codec. The audio files are .mp4.
Ther is a lot of metadata in the structure of the iTunes library. Some of the Album and Song and Artist information had to be manually entered. Ditto for album artwork. Further, I believe Apple Lossless is not a universal encoding.
I tried creating a Plex Server Library (type Music) and pointing it to the Music folder in my iTunes media library. Ass soon as I changed directory to the iTunes directory, I was unable to browse deeper. (No folders were made available in the Plex Server / Web GUI.)
I Googled, but what I found was about getting Apple Music DRM protected files to stream on Plex. My library is not purchased from Apple Music and is not DRM locked.
Short of ripping all my audio CDs again, can I convert my iTunes Music folder into something Plex can work with?
Plex is not a file browser.
If you add a folder to a Plex library, Plex first has to scan its content and build a database of artists, albums and tracks.
This process can take a very long time, if the source media either are not organized perfectly or also if you have many of the “analysis” features of Plex set to be performed immediately after scanning new content.
After clicking the Browse for Folder (or something like that) in the second step of Add Library, I could not traverse the directory tree to my D;\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Music directory. So I assumed something was wrong.
But there is an edit control at the top of the Add Library step 2 page. Clicking in the edit control allowed me to type in the path. After I clicked the Add Library button (lower right) Plex started adding all my iTunes Music folder content.
And every CD I have tried playing works great. So Apple Lossless encoding and m4a file format doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Awesome! No need to re-rip anything. Just point to the right folder location and add my music…
