I have a about 4TBs of music on my network drive at the house on a drobo. I want to be able to update/access/ and playblack from that library of music from anywhere and I want the files themselves to stay on the drive and not be copied to my computer. Any good programs for that?
I primarily use itunes but that was basically ease of use and at the time they were fairly user friendly and did an adequate job of keeping it organized. I want anyone in the house to be able to access the library and add update songs as needed. Of course the only help Apple offered was subscribe to their itunes music match subscription, but that’s not what I looking for and they definitely do not have my library of music.
it seems to support SMB, so are you accessing it from Windows as “Map Network Drive”… and such? You should be able to just mount it as a drive letter on your Plex machine, and it will have access to all of your library and Plex can serve it to any device.
Seems like a solved problem, unless there are feature surprises somewhere.
If you have a PlexPass (lifetime subs go for USD$75 during key promo periods), you can use PlexAmp which is a fantastic music player. I have about 80GB of high-bit rate mp3s, and I stream everything. Plex is also great with video content.
I wish I could help more, but I don’t know Drobo interfaces or cfg, and haven’t used plex in years really. On paper it should work, if it’s setup to share correctly, but there are often fiddly bits which take some tinkering. Let us know if you have questions as you go!
I’ll second Plexamp, if only as the best worst option out there. It’s not great however everything else I’ve looked into has been worse for serving up your personal music collection.
Will have to give Plexamp a try, that was the big thing stopping me from switching from subsonic, which is dead/dying as far as I can tell. Hopefully Plexamp can hold up to something like iSub on iOS.
Well I think trying to have the drobo sort my music killed my mac or just incredible timing. Had to buy a new computer that’s how bad it fried my mac. I can play music off the drobo through plex and through itunes but if I try and tell either program to use the folder as a library it just hangs for hours and crashes.
I just would buy a lifetime Plex Pass (I did) and run a music Plex server with a SMB share off the Drobo storage. I run a 50TB movie/music/audiobook/TV server off an old Ryzen and NAS.
I’m on a mac, but the drive is available. I can access the files individually but if I point a program to the folder where they are it’s just too much to handle.
What do you mean “too much?” Try copying a couple of albums/folders/subsection to a local drive to see if it picks up if you point to that first? The Plex Pass is what allows the metadata, lyrics etc.
Nope.
Been waiting on getting my computer back. In the meantime bought a new macbook, but still can’t setup the server to access my music. I’m away for work for the next week, but will give you an update when I get back home. I’m sure it’s something dumb.
In the time since I last posted in this thread, I moved my Plex server off my active daily desktop onto a Raspberry Pi 4 box with external HDD. What a joy not to worry about having that service running! The Pi is always on, low power and was less than $200.
