Agreed. I’ve stated it before in other threads, and I’ll say it again here, but if they asked me in 5 years to pay another $89 or whatever in continuing support for a badge on my server I’d happily do it. Plex is really good. Great UI, great apps, great external enrichments like trailers/subtitles/ratings/actor info, and Plexamp is 9.5/10 for music.

Their biggest fault is how they communicated about the change for remote users. I did have a few family members get the email and ask if they were going to have to start paying monthly now, but they’ve never been on a free server. They should have stated more clearly than if you were on a Plex Pass server that no change is required.

For software I like made by people getting paid, I was happy to pay the one time fee. It’s really good, secure, and downloads are fast now.

I have the same setup with Picard --> mp3tag, it works very well for me. I prefer to overwrite the artist field with the album artist field for cleaner sync to my iPods with MediaMonkey (iPods handled multiple artists in the worst way imaginable).

Picard did take some light up front tweaking to get the directory naming to albumartist\yyyy - albumname\01 songtitle.flac but it was worth it

For audiobooks check out Audiobookshelf. On my NAS I run it in Container Manager (Docker) and get the image directly from the built-in repo. I check for image updates every few weeks, though only to keep compatibility with the apps, as I don’t notice new features. Very easy to set up, just make sure your folders are named correctly.

I’m coming up on 5 years as a Plex pass owner, so my users and I will not be impacted by this change. In five more years if they asked me nicely to pay another $89 to support the service I would. Send me some stickers and put a badge on my server. I get a lot of use out of the software/service, as do my family members.

I will say, I am quite annoyed at the wording and audience of this email. Jellyfin is just not an option for me until there is excellent feature parity with Plex. I know they are a lot of Jellyfin fans here, in my opinion, Plex is a significantly better experience for me.

Is there a reason that you don’t organize your music by artist\album and leverage tags? It’s been some time since I tried Jellyfin, but Plex does an excellent job of tagging (not directly written to original files) and categorizing. It’s a good experience.

You should not be using NAT to access your Plex externally, I will explain.

App.plex.tv and the apps use Plex services to generate a point to point connection from remote clients through your router to the server. This is important because you never need to expose a private IP to the Internet, and the authentication can be protected with something robust like a Google account which support 2FA and even phishing-resistant 2FA.

The combination of more advanced security and secure/convenient SSO authentication are one of the biggest benefits of Plex in my opinion.

Lots of great ideas in this thread. It sounds like you prefer Jellyfin, but I always encourage people to consider Plex. Plex is excellent, and even if you prefer the features or interface of Jellyfin, you should never expose any application (Plex, Jellyfin, or otherwise) directly to the Internet. This should be non-negotiable. Plex uniquely solves for external access with the mobile/desktop apps and app.plex.tv by brokering client connections into your network without a NAT/PAT on your router or firewall. Plex also supports Google logins, which means that you can now have 2fa and potentially phishing-resistant 2fa if you secure your Google account with a passkey.

At my company we only expose our applications behind a WAF and firewall, and I see that some folks here have recommended Cloudflare. For those who may not know, it is no longer enough to simply rely on a firewall. When your application is built with components that may become vulnerable over time, it’s critical to use a WAF.

Plex is excellent, and even if you prefer the features or interface of Jellyfin, you should never expose any application (Plex, Jellyfin, or otherwise) directly to the Internet. This should be non-negotiable. Plex solves for external access with the mobile/desktop apps and app.plex.tv by brokering client connections into your network without a NAT/PAT on your router or firewall.

For a music library, even a small one, tracks should have proper metadata applied to them and be stored in directories. Plex provides guidance on this here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200265296-adding-music-media-from-folders/

My own strategy: I deviate slightly from Plex’s file and directory naming strategy, but it works perfectly. I start with high quality music, mostly from Bandcamp and process it through Musicbrainz Picard into ALBUMARTIST\YYYY - ALBUMNAME\01 - TRACKNAME.FLAC. Picard sets the metadata and ensures that there is an album cover image also.

Before moving the organized files to my Plex server, I run them through MP3Tag and overwrite any mismatched artist names with the album artist (getting rid of artist fields with 'feat xxxx artist’s). This is important for when I sync files in Media Monkey to my iPod, since the iPod would break apart albums with multiple artists. My preference is to keep them grouped together.

Hope this helps good luck 👍. Let me know if you want to know a decent strategy on movie backups also.

I used it on an Android DAP to sync my music collection from my NAS after giving up on Folder sync due to its issues with new file detection breaking after a daylight savings time change. Synching was definitely more reliable but it takes ages to do the scan.

You do not need to port forward to share a Plex instance over the Internet. App.plex.tv manages the inbound connections automatically. All you need to do is manage invites to your friends. They log in with their email/password or with Google SSO to app.plex.tv and your content will be available over a secure connection with no port forwarding.

Plex should not be accessed externally using a port forward. Always use app.plex.tv as it prevents unauthenticated users from seeing the instance.

Just curious, why is that a deal breaker? It seems like a mild form of anti spam protection, potential 2fa backup, and a way to uniquely identify users.