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Hi all,
I am a media professional and when I travel I want to have access to music files, but I do not always have access to internet. I have Plex installed on my laptop and all music is on my server. No problem at home. When I travel, I want to have some subset of that music library also on my laptop. Two reasons:
Sometimes I have not internet at all
I require uncompressed music files that are typically 24/96. I cannot have them transcoded.
While I am at home, is there a way in Plex to tag certain files to be downloaded to my laptop as some sort of duplicate; where when I am remote, it will prioritized playback from a local file rather than the remote one on my server?
You can tell this is written by a coder and not for the general public. Why, why, why? This is for a media player user - right? Not a software programmer.
If Plex does not make their own audio engine, they need to at least make proper file-management tools. Sticking everything on the C drive is an extremely poor practice; and in particular for portable devices like laptops.
Please consider updating your instructions to show how to change the default Plex download folder to some user created folder.
Although I used an elevated Command Prompt, W11 replies: “Access is denied.”
This is why the instructions provided by the Plex team above, is completely useless. Not having this built directly into the application is a fail. No one should expect that one has to be an OS expert just to be able to do this.
I want to “download” my music library to a second drive on my laptop… not completely STUFF my boot/OS drive.
OK… tried numerous things. I cannot find a way of making this work and frankly this has become just another Plex computing science project. I am spending more time figuring out how to make something work, rather then actually listening to music.
Please provide an option in the Plex Player to specify any proper Windows path - including UNC - for the download location (i.e.: SYNC folder).
Not a real solution to the problem, but a possible workaround:
You can create another library that you use specifically for traveling. The media is stored on an external hard disk/SSD or somewhere on the laptop. Before the trip, copy all the files into the directory and update the library - done.
Thought about that… and still might do it, but trying to synchronize the two will be a pain.
For this upcoming trip I just copied my reference files to my laptop for Windows Media player. That seemed the easiest by far.
Before that, I did some tests on syncing files to the default Plex location. OMG is it slow.
Is Plex running some super checksum system in the background when it does this? Why so slow?
I copied files over my network to see the difference and in case there was something else going on, and it was fast; what I expected on my network. In the end I just kept copying until I had my reference files and decided to use WMP.
Someone in charge of downloads might want to see what’s going on.
OK - so that travel example was a total fail. Wow. Without a reliable internet connection (or a lack of one) Plex cannot load metadata. So although I downloaded a whole bunch of files locally, I could not access them because Plex would not load properly.
This makes Plex useless for any travel work unless you have a reliable high-speed connection.
So I have to investigate installing Plex with two libraries; one that connects to my home server and one when I will only access local data.
I have tried searching Plex for instructions on this and could not find anything. Of course I see this: Creating Libraries | Plex Support
But this tells me how to set up libraries; and not if I have existing ones. Do I have to create a new Plex account?
OK… so I have completely given up on Downloads. Is there away to have two accounts the second “travel” account have a smaller subset of media that I can keep on my laptop?
There is no way I should have to purchase two Lifetime Plex accounts just because you don’t have a system that will not work for this basic application.
There is no need for more than one account.
You can set up as many servers as you like.
But yes, using a “mobile” Plex server is fraught with difficulties, which all have to do with the need for an internet connection and/or the restrictions of the local network. It is therefore in most cases not a viable way to use one.
Particularly not when you have to use a local network with heavy restrictions and no means to change any of the settings.
In many cases you are much better off with a traditional file player. And maybe a way to “cast” contents wirelessly to a player in the same local network. (But the latter can also be prevented by security settings of the local network. So maybe you need to travel with your own network equipment.)
Wireless is out. I need to play uncompressed 24-bit high Fs wave or FLAC audio files into pro audio equipment - that typically do not have Wi-Fi connections.
I have searched here; and on Google and it seems lots of folks state that one can do it; but no instructions on how. Maybe I am not searching the right key words…
Maybe I am missing something very basic. Do I have to uninstall my current Plex version on my laptop and then reinstall Plex it by creating a new local Plex Server - say “local music”?
Well that didn’t work. I uninstalled and reinstalled Plex Server- but as soon as I logged into my existing Plex account, it simply populated everything based on my existing home server.
OK… so plan B was to install a new version of Plex server on my laptop and then duplicate a subset of my media library onto local storage. I also installed the windows desktop app for media access. It worked fine for my first trip; I had access to my non-compressed audio formats locally.
Second trip a week later; as soon as I try to login with the desktop app I got this:
