@kirbnlinds - Would be amazing if you could write up a set of instructions!
Incidentally, I saw a message from Gracenote saying they will be supporting OSX. Since OSX and FreeBSD share so much code, why wouldn’t they just go ahead and make the SDK work for both at the same time? Have any of you talking with them asked about that?
@elan said:
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/205744257-Getting-Started-with-Plex-MusicMany features, including premium ones like VEVO music videos, will work on FreeBSD.
Ok…so…I followed the instructions on that page.
Settings->Server->General->Server signed in as xxx (and there’s a “sign out” button…and I have restarted everything since purchasing plex pass)
Settings->Server->Agents->Artists->Last.fm->I have all checkboxes on (including VEVO checkbox) except Fanart.tv
Then I went back to my Music library, hit the gear, and selected “refresh all”…it gave me a warning message, I selected “refresh” and it appeared to start downloading information. I did that last night.
I still have no VEVO options when I hit the three dots on any song or see any indication VEVO is active anywhere in the interface. How do you access VEVO on the FreeNAS version of Plex?
How do you access VEVO on the FreeNAS version of Plex?
This.
I really want the Plex Mix and Moods feature, but at this point, literally NOTHING premium works. There is no reason to pay for Plex if you have BSD. Zippo of the premium features are functional that I can find.
I also would like to be able to make functional playlists and move them from user to user! There’s no way to do this! Making a “sub user” is pointless if I can’t move data between them. You can share libraries between accounts…
What am I missing here that is premium?
@thelanranger Premium Music Videos are not the only adavantages with PlexPass (as we can confirm here https://www.plex.tv/features/plex-pass/).
As for VEVO Music Videos they are no longer working, unfortunately VEVO decided to discontinued this (nothing Plex can do about it 
)
There is a way around the FreeBSD Premium music problem.
I’m running a FreeNAS (FreeBSD) server to manage the storage, and a Plex Media Server under Ubuntu to get the Gracenote music library features. Both are running as virtual machines under VMware ESXi (which is free), and connect using NFS.
I migrated the databases and metadata (about 50GB) from a Plex jail quickly and simply - just copy the lot across and make sure the the plex user and group own the directory structure.
Just a note on using FreeNAS as a VM: it’s discouraged on the FreeNAS forums, mainly because ZFS is very picky about having total and sole access to the disks. So I installed and passed through an LSI 9211-8 disk controller to the FreeNAS VM, and it’s all been working happily for some time.
And if Gracenote do every produce a FreeBSD-compatible product, it’s going to be simple enough to copy the metadata back to a standard FreeNAS jail.
how is this still a thing, a year plus later.
I understand its expensive to develop, but ultimately I don’t need a subscription to use plex desktop on my HTPC. The benefits are marginal, gracenote is literally the only feature worth paying for.
I finally migrated all 2tb of my music from my synology to my freenas, only to find out gracenote matching isn’t available on freeBSD. No point in rebuilding 8TB of data just to get it running on a vbox. Not that I don’t think that would work, I just would rather have it work right native in BSD.
There are five pages of subscriber tears here.
This really should be noted if you try to resub from a FreeBSD plex app, I feel like I was taken to the cleaners. I get to move all of my music back to the synology just to use the one feature, kind of absurd.
@sover640 said:
how is this still a thing, a year plus later.I understand its expensive to develop, but ultimately I don’t need a subscription to use plex desktop on my HTPC. The benefits are marginal, gracenote is literally the only feature worth paying for.
I finally migrated all 2tb of my music from my synology to my freenas, only to find out gracenote matching isn’t available on freeBSD. No point in rebuilding 8TB of data just to get it running on a vbox. Not that I don’t think that would work, I just would rather have it work right native in BSD.
You don’t need to rebuild anything, you can just use NFS…There are five pages of subscriber tears here.
Yes and most seem to understand its really not a Plex issue… Plex can’t do much If gracenote just won’t give FreeBSD binaries/libs…
I disagree this is the only feature worth paying for, but that will always be a personal decision so I respect yours, only wanted to clarify (once more) that this is something gracenote is not offering, its not open source so Plex can’t do much except offer an alternative which Plex does…
Its sad indeed but people must complain to gracenote, but tbh they probably just think the userbase is not worth their dev time… 
@mikec_pt said:
its not open source so Plex can’t do much except offer an alternative which Plex does…
I’ve spent a lot of time getting the tags and filenames right, I can’t really find an alternative for plex mix feature that lets me use all of my flac.
Its sad indeed but people must complain to gracenote, but tbh they probably just think the userbase is not worth their dev time…
I still think that as a part of subscription fees this could have been easily rectified. I’m not trying to compare apples to oranges, but amazon prime as a subscription service does a lot with their user’s money. I’m just saying people should get their money’s worth, I feel like I haven’t gotten that.
@sover640 said:
@mikec_pt said:
its not open source so Plex can’t do much except offer an alternative which Plex does…
I’ve spent a lot of time getting the tags and filenames right, I can’t really find an alternative for plex mix feature that lets me use all of my flac.
The alternative in that case is not run FreeBSD then if its that important to you as a feature, you can still use FreeBSD for ZFS and use NFS to access you’re media.
If that’s really the key thing for you with PlexPass then its only understandable you would prefer to use it, and if so then FreeBSD is not the best option and this is actually stated in the FAQ, its not like you pay for PlexPass only to find out later the feature you want its not supported in FreeBSD.
Its sad indeed but people must complain to gracenote, but tbh they probably just think the userbase is not worth their dev time…
I still think that as a part of subscription fees this could have been easily rectified. I’m not trying to compare apples to oranges, but amazon prime as a subscription service does a lot with their user’s money. I’m just saying people should get their money’s worth, I feel like I haven’t gotten that.
" I still think that as a part of subscription fees this could have been easily rectified"
In the meantime devs even added new features to regular Music Libs, wich come with PMS for free, so I think if it was that easy Plex devs would certainly do it 
But anyway much as been posted about this… sadly posting more won’t force gracenote to do this… at least not here.
@mikec_pt said:
Yes and most seem to understand its really not a Plex issue… Plex can’t do much If gracenote just won’t give FreeBSD binaries/libs…
Plex is not blameless here. No one made Plex choose an option that doesn’t work across all “supported” PMS platforms, versus alternatives like Musicbrainz/Picard, freedb, etc.
That aside, considering that FreeBSD has Linux binary compatibility (some of my first work w/ FreeBSD GUI desktops in the 90s involved running the Linux versions of RealPlayer and WordPerfect on it) I’m not really sure what the problem is.
@sremick said:
Plex is not blameless here. No one made Plex choose an option that doesn’t work across all “supported” PMS platforms, versus alternatives like Musicbrainz/Picard, freedb, etc.
This has been discussed before and the result is Gracenote’s features outweighed the disadvantage of lack of FreeBSD support. I seriously hope you are not advocating the rejection of any feature that doesn’t work across all platforms.
That aside, considering that FreeBSD has Linux binary compatibility (some of my first work w/ FreeBSD GUI desktops in the 90s involved running the Linux versions of RealPlayer and WordPerfect on it) I’m not really sure what the problem is.
Are you posing the question of what the problem is toward Gracenote or Plex?
I definitely won’t say that it’s Plex’s fault. In the end of the day, it’s a third party product.
If I was plex, I’d have used my userbase as a leverage on gracenote (if it hadn’t been done already!) and try to convince them to create a freebsd version.
Have Plex considered an alternative service that covers all the supported OS’ by the PMS to replace gracenote?
I know, too much work for a small userbase… I’m asking just of curiosity’s sake
@gbooker02 said in another post “Hopefully this will be made much simpler for a majority of users under FreeNAS 10 which desires to migrate these uses to docker which runs the linux version of the server. As a side note, this will also bring GraceNote support to FreeNAS users since they don’t have a FreeBSD compatible library for us to use.” so bring on docker.
I don’t know the details of the conversation with Gracenote as I was not a party to it, but I do know that we did ask about FreeBSD. As per alternatives, I don’t know the details but I do know they were considered and not as good for one reason or another.
The docker version (which will be what’s used in FreeNAS 10) looks like it’ll be the ultimate solution here. Given that a vast majority of our FreeBSD users are FreeNAS, I expect that in a year’s time there will be almost no users at all using the FreeBSD version of PMS.
Honestly, I only have to deal with FreeBSD because of FreeNAS. I only use FreeNAS in order to get the benefit of ZFS. I’m hoping that ReFS and Storage Spaces will be able to replace ZFS sufficiently (at least for my uses) such that I can use Windows Server. Honestly, Gracenote missing from FreeBSD is just one of a laundry list of issues that I have with FreeNAS. Literally every time that I have to make a change to the system I have to prepare a weekend to reconfigure. With a Windows system it’s maybe a reboot or 15-20 mins.
Plus, if I can, now, get Plex into a VM, then I can move it around more easily on windows and it won’t ever be an issue again. (I currently run two servers, one for the Music feature and one for the video.)
I’d rather they focus on cleaning up the system, make it crash less on the client end (Amazon Fire, Windows mobile, Browser, etc) giving a few more features (music videos!, more robust music cataloging, deduping maybe?) then worrying about expanding the gracenote engine to an OS that only a handful of people use. And let’s be honest…if you use FreeBSD then you know how to install a VM with linux/windows/whatever inside BSD to run your plex server on it. It is a minor annoyance at this point.
@thelanranger said:
Honestly, I only have to deal with FreeBSD because of FreeNAS. I only use FreeNAS in order to get the benefit of ZFS.
FWIW, I’ve been using ZFS on Linux for the past 4 years with zero problems, works great. A bunch of other Plex employees do as well.
@gbooker02 said:
Given that a vast majority of our FreeBSD users are FreeNAS, I expect that in a year’s time there will be almost no users at all using the FreeBSD version of PMS.
Good lord I hope not, that would be the death knoll for Plex FreeBSD development. I for one am not going to give up FreeBSD just for Plex.
Ugh! It pains me that FreeBSD doesn’t get wider support. =(( It’s a fantastic OS and I love everything about it.
@gbooker02 said:
The docker version (which will be what’s used in FreeNAS 10) looks like it’ll be the ultimate solution here. Given that a vast majority of our FreeBSD users are FreeNAS, I expect that in a year’s time there will be almost no users at all using the FreeBSD version of PMS.
I must admit, as a “native” FreeBSD user (having recently switched back from Ubuntu), I’m curious about the relative ratios.
Mind you, it looks like running a Linux docker container on FreeBSD is pretty simple these days, even if the overheads may be problematic.
@thelanranger said:
Honestly, I only have to deal with FreeBSD because of FreeNAS. I only use FreeNAS in order to get the benefit of ZFS. I’m hoping that ReFS and Storage Spaces will be able to replace ZFS sufficiently (at least for my uses) such that I can use Windows Server.
I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’ve been watching the ReFS and Storage Space development for the past few years and they have an extremely long way to go. It also looks like they are not intending to go quite in the direction of replicating many of the ZFS features.
@MacGriogair said:
Mind you, it looks like running a Linux docker container on FreeBSD is pretty simple these days, even if the overheads may be problematic.
You should look at what FreeNAS 10 is doing. First off they are using byhve for the hypervisor and the memory usage of the VM is not exclusive but rather it scales with actual usage within the VM. They’ve also done some other interesting things such as using 9pfs for the docker mounts from the host. It seems like the overhead is going to be quite small.
Of course, the real reason they are doing this is that there are many useful programs not available for FreeBSD and thus their previous plugin system was limited in terms of what they could run. Adopting the linux docker ecosystem opens up a tremendous amount of programs that would otherwise not be available.
Former ubuntu and openzfs user myself.
Although it works, having a filesystem on an OS as a hack (OK, maybe not “hack” but not native to it nontheless), doesn’t inspire me too much confidence…
I had issues, mainly when new patches installed: sometimes, the kernel drivers won’t load and the system won’t boot.
I believe docker is the way forward when a stable freenas v10 gets released.
For now, a second server just for music on a debian bhyve should do the trick.
