I’m new to Plex and more or less completely lost. But to start with… what, if anything, does the iTunes plugin do? It’s turned on for music files but as far as I can tell it doesn’t do anything. I didn’t install this and can’t find it anywhere so is it part of Plex? I also can’t find where its settings are stored - I tried putting in an easily searchable nonsense word for XML Path, shutting down Plex server, and when I restart it, the path I put in is still there. But if I do a contents search over all my user directory files (all the way down the tree, including hidden files) that string doesn’t turn up anywhere.
Thanks. I’m on OS X, use iTunes and have a large iTunes music library. The plugin doesn’t seem to be doing anything for me. If it is supposed to be seeing ~/Music/iTunes and automatically scanning/making it available, it either isn’t doing that or I don’t know how to make the results available because my Plex Library remains completely empty.
I have completely (as best I can tell - I’ve searched and deleted every folder/file with plex in its name from the machine and reinstalled from scratch) uninstalled Plex and reinstalled it from the latest zip file but that didn’t help.
it it pointed to the same music folder that itunes is?
you might want to check the path and permissions on the itunes.xml file so plex can access it.
you use to be able to trigger a manual import on the music library context menu, but I don’t see it on my server (I don’t have an itunes xml path configured).
No. I haven’t created a Music Library since I thought the plugin was just going to somehow make the iTunes library available to me (the XML file is in the canonical location and the permissions are fine). I started to create a library but didn’t understand how that was supposed to play with the iTunes plugin. If I have to manually create a library pointed to ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music (or whatever - where should I point it?) and scan that then what is the purpose of the plugin?
I have not created a new music library recently, but it should be fairly straight forward.
add new library, select music, select the path to your music files, adjust any options, and at some point it should (or used to) ask if you want to import from itunes, you would then select yes or checkbox or whatever.
then plex will scan your files and attempt to import your files and the data from the itunes xml, which can take a very long time depending on the size of your music library and how powerful or not your computer is.
the purpose of the plugin is to import your existing itunes PLAY COUNTS, PLAY LISTS, RATINGS etc.
if you just scan in your music files, then you will start with a fresh music library with no plays (which may or may not be what you want).
basically, the itunes plugin lets you jump start the plex music library, by importing your music play history and playlists.
here is an old support article about itunes plugin.
as you can see, it has not really been updated or maintained.
I do not know how well it will work with the recent changes to the music library.
the itunes plugin may eventually be removed entirely, it may not even work currently.
When I started to add a library before I don’t remember it asking me anything about iTunes. From the way things were worded I just assumed that if you had that plugin enabled Plex would just automatically import from iTunes.
I had seen that page but it didn’t really clear anything up for me, I guess what I needed was some sort of explaner on just what the plugin did and how it played with Library creation.
Thanks! I’ll double check iTunes to make sure the XML file is enabled (it should be, I always keep that enabled). Do I need to manually enter the XML path in the advanced settings or since the iTunes library the standard default location will the Plugin just find it if I leave it blank?
OK. So I’ve got a Music library now but no artwork at all - do I have to do something to get Plex to import that too? All the art is in my iTunes folder.
I’ll just wait a while then - but it does seem to be finding local artwork. If it’s doing stuff out on the net it doesn’t seem to be doing much of it because I’m not seeing much, if any network traffic on that machine.
I think I’m giving up on Plex. It never did load any artwork so I deleted the library and created a new one. Still no art so I uninstalled Plex and removed ~/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server ~/Library/Logs/Plex Media Server and ~/Library/Preferences/com.plexapp.plexmediaserver.plist. Which was everything I could find. I reinstalled Plex from the zip file and started plex. Apparently Plex data is still stored somewhere I couldn’t find because it already knew my email address when it started. But when I used the “?” to bypass the login I got:
A problem has been detected with a core component of Plex Media Server.
Please visit the [forums] and provide your logs, as described [here]
This didn’t happen the last time I installed it. And I don’t want to deal with it.
I’ve been trying to get Plex to work right for more than 6 hours now with no luck. All I want to be able to do is have a DLNA server on this iMac so we can use our music collection our Rokus. This is too much work and there is too little documentation and what documentation I have found seems to be largely obsolete. I give up.
