Hi there, I am a new user and not a very technical one.
I am running Sonos, Plex, and Plexamp. My music files are in the P-Cloud, accessible from laptop and mobile.
Now I am experiencing the following:
If I want to play my music, whether from my laptop or phone, and if Plex is not running on my laptop, the system can not find the music.
So first I have to go to the Plex website, log in, and then only I can play my music.
Same of course from mobile: I must start my laptop and Plex before I can play music from phone.
Is this what everybody is experiencing? Thanks for advice.
What is that?
If you mean “Plex Cloud”: there is no such thing.
If you have installed Plex Server on your laptop, that is where your “Plex” is. Your laptop has to be running if you want to use any of your plex clients.
It is a server. In order for it to serve, it has to be running.
As its name implies: this is the server.
Plex clients only communicate with the server. They don’t access the media storage directly. They always ask the server for the media, which fetches it for them (and adapts it to the abilites of the player, and/or the available network bandwidth if required.)
OK. Thanks again, Otto, I understand it, I think. Happy New Year!
So, for me the solution would be: have a media server on my mobile.
The music files are in the cloud, my media server on the phone then would be able to give access to the files and the plexamp app. Would it not?
No. While that seems to be an option on first look, it’s not a good one.
Mobile OS’s are super aggressive when it comes to pushing apps to the background (or to exit them) – that’s not a good baseline for a media server.
On top, there’s no Plex Media Server app for mobile platforms.
If you don’t want to rely on your laptop to be “always on”, you could run your server on a different platform (e.g. a NAS, Nvidia Shield…).
