My AIFF files are not showing in my PLEX Media Server. Is this common? What do I need to do to make them available in the server?
I am not going to pay for Plex Pass if all of my files will not be available, especially considering 80% of my music files are AIFF…
Plex server recognizes AIFF files in general.
Unfortunately it doesn’t read metadata from them.
So the only hint for Plex what is in such a file can come from its file name
and the folder structure where this file is situated.
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200265296-Adding-Music-Media-From-Folders
Your files are probably showing up under Various Artists in your library now.
Thanks for the response!
All of my files are structured precisely this way. Any other suggestions/possibilities?
What do you mean, “Your files are probably showing up under Various Artists in your library now.”
@DMazar said:
All of my files are structured precisely this way. Any other suggestions/possibilities?
What do you mean, “Your files are probably showing up under Various Artists in your library now.”
They did show up there for me when I tested an aiff file without the necessary folder structure.
When you change the view mode of your music library to ‘Artists’
and you then enter the ‘Various Artists’ category, you’ll probably find those tracks under one or several [Unknown Album] entries. Sometimes also mixed in to other ‘sampler style’ albums.
Could you give me a particular example of the file names and the folder structure for one of your albums?
This thread is a few years old already - has Plex done anything to display the AIFF metadata the way iTunes already does?
I hope too, AIFF Support is coming soon. I have a massive music library in CD Quality, saved as perfectly tagged AIFF. Would really love to integrate it into Plex. Currently i am using Sonos, which works great at home but not elswhere.
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Honestly, if you want a solution now, convert them to Flac format.
This is lossless as well and has good support, even in a non-Apple environment. (And it will save some storage space too [between 18 – 30%]).
I don’t see a good reason to use the proprietary AIFF format anymore.
I see a good reason… AIFF is uncompressed. FLAC is compressed. Storage is not very expensive.
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That is no good reason, since flac is lossless.
Lossless means, if the player is extracting the audio data for playback, it gets a bit-perfect copy of the original pcm data.
Still, AIFF is a popular file format for Audiophiles, and it would benefit Plex to support it.
In theory you are right, FLAC (as ALAC) has identical data but it is compressed (saves some space and embedded metadata). For my other audio system there is a audible difference in sound quality how the FLAC/ALAC is being transcoded to WAV (since the renderer accepts WAV in the end).
WAV and AIFF are practically identical except for the container it holds, with the advantage towards AIFF where metadata is natively supported, where WAV does not. That is why I have all my files in AIFF.
It would be really great if Plex could support AIFF metadata, because right now I need to create duplicate music libraries on my server for the different music formats.
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Same here. All my music is in AIFF as opposed to WAV because of the metdata. AIFF is supported by Sonos and by Pionner DJ equipment. I am currently converting everything to ALAC to use with plex so I have two copies of everything. Why not just use ALAC? Can’t guarantee that is supported on the Pioneer stuff.
Hello, I work at DEEWEE Music Studio’s in Ghent Belgium.
At DEEWEE we’re huge fans of Plex. We have a record collection of over 60K (!!!) albums, and digitise most of them. To AIFF format… We chose this because this format is a DAW music industry standard. And if we need a track for editing, we need to have the uncompressed file, with additional metadata that we manually put in which is a feature FLAC does not support.
Now I have a few questions. With Plex being our ‘in studio’ media player, it’s a real bummer that the support for the aiff file format is so poor in Plex.
Can anybody tell me what the developers are planning to do about this issue in the near future? Does anybody know if this will be fixed? Thanks for getting back on this.
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Another vote for AIFF metadata integration… as a DJ, I store a lot of music in the AIFF format because older CDJs and club equipment only handle MP3, AAC, WAV, and AIFF.
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Hej Guys, good news!
ssince a few versions, this is perfectly working including reading of Metadata etc. 
/Tobi
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