Play audio on speakers?

General Discussions
1

Hello All,

I am really new to Plex. I am considering installed it. I would like to know what would be a good way for streaming audio from my own library (bunch of MP3) and have it play on speakers installed in the house. If anyone can share their experience or ideas I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks.
-C

2

The Chromecast Audio appears to be a good choice.

Disclaimer: I personally don’t use these, but I know of a certain Plex developer who uses and endorses them.

3

@Clodio66
I use the CCA’s. I have four of them around the house. Best thing is you can group them into groups and cast to those groups.
So I have about 6 or 7 groups and we cast to the groups we want sound in. Whole house group plays to them all and the music is sync’d perfectly.
At $35 a piece you can’t really go wrong.

4

I have just sort of stumbled on what for me is a great solution for this. But I use it for audiobooks and I do not know how well it would work for music but I suspect it would be at least as good for music as it is for audiobooks. It does not use Plex but I “think” Plex, say OpenPHT running on it could be controlled the same way.

  1. I got and setup a small computer with enough attached storage to hold all my audio library. It does not need to be anything special but Bluetooth is a requirement for what I did.
  2. I installed and fully set up MediaMonkey on that computer but, like I said, I “think” OpenPHT or PMP would work as well.
  3. I bought an Amazon Dot. (An Amazon Echo or a Tap will not work for this as they do not have audio out.)
  4. I then paired the Dot with the computer and made it the default speaker.
  5. I then ran the audio cable from the Dot to my central distribution amp.
  6. Now whenever I play an audio file on the computer it plays throughout the house.

There are other things that make this very good for me because the Bluetooth connection allow for some control over playback.
When it is playing if I say “Alexa pause” the playback pauses. “Alexa skip forward” skips to the next chapter or book in my now playing list and “back” goes to the previous.
“Alexa Play” will restart the playback if the bluetooth was the last thing played otherwise I have to sometimes say “Alexa connect” or “Alexa play Bluetooth” to get the correct system playing. Alexa is pretty smart but in some ways she does not read meanings underlying the commands very well.
I can change the playback volume with a voice command like “Alexa volume up 5%”
Any Alexa alarms or notifications and heard throughout the house.
I can also play Pandora or Amazon Prime music by a simple command like “Alexa play Chick Corea radio on Pandora.”
There is also the additional benefit that I can play my Audible library by the name of the book like “Alexa Play To Kill a Mockingbird.” Of course you you have to have that book in your Audible library.
And one further benefit, and the one that pushed this ideal over the top for me, is that I can have Alexa read any Kindle book I have access to. She reads in a very natural style and I mistook her reading for an actual audiobook playback more than once.

I hope at some point that Plex may be directly controllable through the Echo system but this works pretty good, after a little setup, for now.

EDIT: I just tested and this method does allow OpenPHT to be partially controlled. Pause, Play and skip (if you are using a playlist) works OK but I prefer the MediaMonkey solution because Plex has no audiobook support and the audio handling in general is primitive at best.

5

Thanks for the replies all. rsava I will not pretend to know what CCAs are. Can you please tell me what those are? The idea of being able to have groups is interesting.

6

CCA = Chromecast Audio

7

Just Installed Plex on a PC and got a CCA to experiment with. Thank you all for the comments.