whenever something like this has been in every other music player I ever had it has always been a disaster, I’m hoping this music player is not going to wreck my already organized and sorted music/movie/picture library.
I have over the last 22 years meticulously organized, named directories, named files, etc so I can find and play exactly the playlists I want with VLC.
Now I would like to be able to have Alexa play those same directories, named files, etc.
I am told that Plex will do the job, but I don’t want Plex to move any of my files or rename any of my files. Can someone please explain how I can get this to work and confirm that if I do it Plex isn’t going to mess with my file organization?
I have over 1TB of music. It is not feasible to upload it to the internet. so any online suggestion is no good. If I understand Plex correctly, It will go to my Shared Network drive via my LAN to get the files, to play. I want to be able to do something like “Alexa play plex directory allman” and then all the mp3 files that are in the directory \shared_drive_name\music\allman" will start playing.
Plex cannot and will not do that. It won’t alter your media files at all.
With all good (and less convenient) consequences.
Plex doesn’t handle folders full of music well. It pretty much requires you to have an organization of
Music > Artist Name > Album Title > tracks
From what you wrote above, it appears you are missing the ‘Album’ folder level, so that will be less than optimal.
Plus Alexa does support playing music from a certain artist, it has still some issues recognizing artist’s names correctly.
Plex never ever renames or move or otherwise changes your files. However what you see in your file system may well not be at all what you see inside Plex.
Plex pretty much does its own thing internally and the only option to avoid what Plex does is to not use many of the “features” Plex offers.
For me Plex worked fine (I have found I prefer Emby but that is actually another issue) with TV shows and movies but I quite early abandoned using Plex for music as I hated what it tried to do. (I do not like Emby’s music handling any better.)
I have found that unless you structure and name your files EXACTLY as Plex wants them Plex is a very poor music handler.
Thank you all for your answer, they relieve me at least as far as my drive not being effected.
I think I did not make my self clear with my example of "“Alexa play plex directory allman” "
I in no way meant to imply that I wanted Alexa to look at the artist. Most of my mp3’s do not have the metatag of artist filled. What I was referring to with how I want PLex/Alexa to work is:
I have a directory in my shared drive labeled “allman” it exists at say \192.168.1.100\cdrive\music\allman (aka, if you open the file explorer and type that string in, you will see a list of files in that directory,) and if you tell alexa to “play through plex the directory labeled allman” WHATEVER MP3 files that are in the directory “allman” it will play. the word “allman” can be anything it has nothing to do with an artist.
I can have a directory called “fubar” and I should be able to tell alexa to “play directory fubar” and whatever mp3’s are in that directory should be played.
If I add files to the directory “fubar”, then the next time I play “fubar” those new files will also play. In this way I make/change playlists by simply putting mp3 files in any directories I like.
Can PLEX-Alexa do this?
This works great on VLC, I just file–>open a directory and off VLC plays all the files in that directory. easy peasy. I just make a copy of the mp3 file in different directories that I like. Its ok, disk space is cheap these days.
The bottom line is I want an Alexa function to go out and play all the music in a directory on some computer/drive on my network. Will Plex get me to that result? Ideally I can also tell Alexa to play that directory in loop mode forever. Even better to keep playing for xxx minutes.
