How to make Plex play entire MP3 music albums?

General Discussions
1

Hi,

I’m very new to Plex (about 2 hrs). During Christmas dinner, my wife asked me to put some Christmas music on our media system. Since we recently moved in to the house, all of out physical CDs are still in boxes. All of our CD collection is stored on an external drive attached to a computer in my office, though. So, I thought that if I just put our Mannheim Steamroller holiday MP3 albums on a thumb drive, I could play them with our Sony Blu-ray player. While the Sony found the folders the MP3s were in, when I selected them, I got a “No Media Found” error. When that didn’t work, I knew I would probably need to set up some kind of server, if I was ever going to play the music files on any device other than the computer in my office. That led me to Plex tonight.

I installed the Plex server on my computer, and created a music library (which is all of the MP3 albums on my SSD). It took Plex quite a bit of time to sort through the 1600, or so, MP3 albums, find appropriate album art for them, and configure everything. The client in our media system is Amazon Fire Stick with Alexa, and I started playing with that about an hour ago. The order of the music albums in trhe “recently added” list seemed random (i.e., the file structure on my SSD is \MP3’Genre’‘Artist’‘Album’, and the order in the list was neither alphabetical, or by any other means that bears a relationship to how the files are stored on the SSD). So, in recreating the issue from Christmas day, I tried to find the Mannheim Steamroller albums. After a few minutes I realized that that technique wasn’t going to work, and I realized that the final solution would require some playlist structure. However, for the time being, I would be satisfied with playing one complete album at a time (which is what I would have had to do if I was playing the physical CDs, anyway). I then tried the library access from the Fire Stick, and found that I could access the files using the identical structure as on the SSD. However, while I could play any single MP3 I wanted that way, I couldn’t find a way to play the whole MP3 album at once.

Between then and when I started typing this, I searched for information on the creation of playlists, and found that to be a confusing mess. So, now I am looking for a solution. BTW, I tried searching for Mannheim Steamroller using Alexa, but was directed to a nice assortment of CDs, etc., available at Amazon.

My two basic questions are:

How do I play a complete MP3 album after finding it &

Is there any easy way to search my libraries for what I want to play?

Thanks in advance,

John

2

very simple – actually…
if you access Plex via the browser (or one of the many clients), don’t solely depend on the “recently added” and other Hubs on the sever homepage. You can also click on the library (let’s assume you named it “Mucis”).
There you have all the freedom to chose how your music is being presented (by artist, by album or by title). Plex organization is usually furthermore supported by the ability to filter and sort your media. By default you’ll see your library e.g. as All Albums by title…

  • instead of All you can apply a filter, e.g. by Genre such as Holidays/X-Mas
  • instead of Albums you can pick artists or titles (as described above)
  • instead of by title you can sort them by… rating, artist and so on

So when you see an entire album somewhere in those views (e.g. on an artists’ overview page or on the library homepage when displaying Albums) you can simply click on the album and Plex will play the entire album (or if you chose to it’ll add the entire album to play after the current playback ends).

So no need to go with a playlist for what you’re looking for.

I recommend to take a look at the Plex support pages which describe how the app is used and where to find certain features.
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/sections/200225647

3

Thank you! After experimenting for a bit last night, I was able to set up several playlists that function correctly on the Fire Stick client side. My problem today is that I can’t seem to get access to the server on the PC. When I click the Plex Server icon nothing happens.

4

try accessing https://your-servers-ip-address:32400/web or https://app.plex.tv/desktop from your browser.