I’ve been running my Plex server for about 13 years in a Docker container on unRAID and for the most part have been pretty happy with it. Recently I started having issues that only appeared when I streamed 4K movies. It would have to buffer every 3-5 minutes. I went through the process, knocking one thing off at a time. First I moved it from some old WD Red drives to a new WD Gold drive, but the buffering still continued. Then I thought it must be my database on spinny platters that was causing the issue, so I moved it to a M.2 drive and this is where everything went from bad to worse. In the process of moving (using the same process I’ve used to move terabytes of data), the database got messed up. I had never gotten around to setting up a backup because of the way unRAID parity is setup, it was safe barring a house fire, then by database is the least of my concerns.
As I began rebuilding my library, I realized I had no way of recovering playlists. Even though I had some of them on Plexamp, I couldn’t find a good, foolproof way to ensure I wouldn’t lose anything else. And since Plex has not done much with music, 10 Year Old Suggestion, Can’t Import or Export Playlists and Plex decided NOT to create a way for automatic backups I decided it was time to break my music off to a service that cares, and supports m3u playlist files. This week I’ve been busy trying to rebuild playlists from Spotify, and what remained on Plexamp and create them in Navidrome. I’ve manually moved my playlists from iTunes all those years ago into Plex, and now I had to manually move them out. I also have an automatic backup setup, which was super easy - just edit their config file. I have all my m3u files safely stored in GitHub so even if I lose this library, all I’ll really lose is play counts and ratings. So far I haven’t found an player that is as beautiful as Plexamp and I will miss it, but the peace of mind that comes from automatic backups built into the product and at will exporting of m3u files as I update them has me singing with my music again!
I decided to give the free competition a try, so I created a new Docker container for Jellyfin and pointed it to my movies and TV shows. It was different, but after it did enough of a library scan to see some things, I began to notice some huge differences. Jellyfin also has collections, but they are automatically categorized, so all my Marvel movies are together, as is my James Bond collection, without me having to do anything. I decided to try the Roku app, and it automatically found my new Jellyfin server, and I was presented with MY media, not the streaming service Plex has turned into. Just a nice, simple, uncluttered interface by default. So far I’m liking my 2 days with Jellyfin more than I’ve enjoyed my 13 years with Plex. This morning I pointed it to my home movies and pictures, and it’s still doing a library scan, but it’s building thumbnails and previews for my videos, instead of the black box Plex presented for my videos. Once these get loaded in will be the real test, but up to this point the performance has felt light years faster than Plex. Oh, and Jellyfin has backups too.
I walked upstairs last night and my wife was watching one of her Christmas shows on the Roku and just out of curiosity I asked her how she was streaming it, and she had chosen to watch it with Jellyfin. Then she started telling me how much faster it was than Plex ever was. If it works, she’s good with it, so this was a surprise. I thought I had seen a performance improvement with Jellyfin, but I disregarded it as just my perception, but her raving about the performance improvement made me realize it wasn’t just in my mind. Today my son watched Cars that I re-ripped and just left in mkv. Plex could never stream anything this large. In fact I ripped a 4k UHD and had it encoded into an m4a to make it easier on Plex and it still struggled. Jellyfin just streamed the raw mkv without buffering once. I checked the logs and it was doing transcoding, but it still looked beautiful. He’s always dogged the video quality from Plex, so I’ve been trying to balance Plex playback with good audio and good video. I’ve tried so many different combinations and just wished I could leave it as mkv and have it stream well. I have an enterprise grade network, so I know it’s not my network latency because everything else happens with ease. It was always just Plex. Now Jellyfin has zero issues. I am completely done with Plex. What started as a horrible thing - losing my entire library - has turned into the best thing that could have happened. I’ll be re-ripping my BluRay and 4K UHD collection now. My music is great and I’m exporting my playlists on about a weekly cadence, even though I have backups. In fact, both Navidrome and Jellyfin have automatic backups configured, and they are both open source products. It’s very sad that open source is so much more performant and feature-rich than a paid product, and that Plex has become another company that doesn’t really care about their customers. In November I was sad to think I might be walking away from Plex. Today however I realize I’m upgrading in every single aspect, except I’m losing Plexamp. That was the one app Plex made for us music lovers and it was great. Probably one of the greatest music apps on the market in fact. That’s the only tinge of sadness I feel about walking away from Plex.
Where does it store them? I’ve searched the documentation for how to backup, and even linked a thread in this forum about Plex’s decision against automatic backups.
The location of the database backups will vary by operating system. Unless you’ve altered the location via the Backup directory advanced setting, you’ll find the backup files under the Plug-in Support/Databases subdirectory inside the normal server data directory.
Considering it was the server data directory that got corrupted in the file move, having a backup in the same place wouldn’t do me any good.
For your Jellyfin environment try Finamp as a replacement for PlexAmp. I’m a pretty basic playlist-in-the-car oriented Plexamp user, and I run Jellyfin as a backup for Plex. I’ve done a little experimenting with Finamp, and it seemed to meet my (very basic) music needs.
I wish I could. I split my music off and it runs on Navidrome and just my videos are on Jellyfin. It can do it all, but Navidrome seems to be just a little bit better for music. Although, there aren’t as many apps for Navidrome as I had seen originally because most of them you find are deprecated. Symphonium is the big Android app that connects to pretty much every server, but after having PlexAmp for so long, not much else compares. I might just have to load the music onto Jellyfin so I can use Finamp
I appreciate you sharing your experience with Jellyfin and including real world experience and technical setup\environment details. Most of them aren’t very constructive comparisons.
Is there a specific reason you didn’t bother running Plex just for PlexAmp? In most conversations I’ve seen about switching away from Plex, lots of folks stick with it as it’s still hard to beat. I hadn’t heard of Navidrome but it does look interesting.
Fair enough but I wouldn’t necessarily blame Plex directly for the choice not to backup Plex data directory. It’s not hard to set a backup\rsync routine in unRAID to copy that small PlexData folder to another location.
At the same time, it would be nice - and I feel trivial - for Plex to include an advanced setting to set a backup path to another location. I get why they likely didn’t (“resources” or “complexity”), but don’t agree with it.
Oooo… that looks nice. Thanks for the recommendation. Bookmarking that one.
This is just one of the reasons I didn’t want to setup Plex again just for music. Plex created Plexamp, and it feels that was the last thing done for music. They appear to be much more interested in streaming subscriptions apps instead of a personal collection. Yes, the backup option would be trivial for them to add. That’s my issue with Plex. So much low-hanging fruit that would make their product great again. But Jellyfin can do everything Plex can, and do it better, and it’s free! It’s sad, because I spent so many years with Plex fine tuning my library. Yes, I know I could/should have setup my own backup for my library. That’s definitely my fault, but for the Plex developers to make the decision they don’t want to even setup a simple backup solution since everything is in the library is a pretty terrible decision. A 10 year old ticket with not even a single response from Plex? That shows how little they actually care. What it seems is Plex started with people who loved movies and music, and now it’s run by people who just want to make money and ride out a once-great product. The lifetime Plex Pass keeps getting more expensive, and in all the years I’ve had them, there have been maybe 3-5 times I was truly excited about a change. But most updates are more about combining streaming platforms within theirs.
I am a music lover, and that’s the most important thing to me - much more than the movies or TV shows. I listen to my music on a daily basis, and I spend hours curating playlists, and Plex has no way to import or export them. They are locked within the library. If I ran Plex for Plexamp, I would be back at my largest frustration with Plex. This library corruption has burned me, and instead of being sad I’m deleting Plex from my phone and deleting my container, I was happy to be moving onto greener pastures. Jellyfin for example, can optionally store all the downloaded metadata for TV shows and movies with the movie folders. One of your movies gets picked up with the wrong one - well, add the IMDB id to the filename and it never will again. It automatically builds collections - you have all the Die Hard, James Bond or Marvel movies? Jellyfin automatically creates collections for them all. That is super cool! Right now, if I lost my Jellyfin library, very little would be lost.
Navidrome lets me export my playlists and they are all sitting in a folder I’ve called Playlists, which Navidrome also looks at to import playlists. Because I’m a software developer by profession, I store these in my GitHub account. I now have change tracking. If my Navidrome library got corrupted or lost, I don’t lose the effort I’ve put into my playlists. If I want to add a bunch of songs, I can just edit the file (it’s not pretty at all), but sometimes it may be faster, or I can have AI make me the file from a Spotify or Tidal export. Navidrome will just pick it up, and it’s pretty smart, so if I had a different album with the same song (Jimmy Buffett, lol), it will just update the path to the best match it can find.
These are just some of the reasons that the loss of Plexamp is lessened. I am so much happier with my new media server choices.
To sort of close the loop on this, the music server and client I want doesn’t exist. So I came up with an idea for now, and I’m parking it for the moment. I’ll get around to building it someday, but today is not that day. I’ve also talked myself out of building a music server.
Overall, for a normal person I’m sure music in Plex is fine. If you like music more, then Jellyfin might be your answer. If you really like music and don’t mind technical UX apps, Navidrome or another Subsonic API server might be for you. I just want it all with no compromises.
