Google Play Music to Plex
The recent death of Google Play Music forced me to adopt a new music streaming platform. I decided on Plex. That migration has not been easy.
Disclaimer: A word to the wise, fix your music folder before you ever bother with the Plex side of things. There are several tools and utilities I have discussed below, but everything is going to work much better if you get the music file structure right first. Everything should be divided into artist, and further divided into album. A free utility called foobar2000 can do that for you, if you take some time to tinker with it. AFTER the file structure of your music is right, THEN download and install the Plex server. If you need to set up a static IP and port forwarding, you can configure that all later. Be wary of my mistake, though, you want the music file structure to be pristine before you try to import it into Plex. Now, onto the ordeal I faced.
I’ve been a power user of Google Play Music since almost the beginning. At least as far back as January 2013, I have an email where I suggested a change to the interface, so I assume it was around then that I first started using the service. It first launched in November 2011, so I picked it up within about a year. I uploaded my entire music collection immediately.
For years, it was my main method of music consumption. I used the Android app and the desktop site. I made my own playlists, and took advantage of the automatic playlists that populated with thumbs up rated music and most recently added tracks. If I bought new digital music, it was exclusively from the Play store. If I bought physical CD music, I ripped it to my PC and uploaded it automatically. If there was something that Google Play Music could do, I probably knew about it, and I took advantage of most of its features.
When Google announced the launch of YouTube Music, I knew it would mean they were cancelling Google Play Music. It had to happen eventually. Google can’t leave good products alone, and they have to kill off pretty much all of their products at some point. Sure enough, they did announce that Google Play Music would be coming to an end, replaced fully by YouTube Music. I wasn’t happy about the decision, but I figured it would be fine. Surely, I would learn to appreciate YouTube Music just as much as I had its predecessor.
As Google Play Music was winding down, Google allowed the option to automatically migrate user uploaded libraries to a YouTube Music account. That was awfully kind of them. Just to be safe, though, I decided to manually export my collection one more time. Soon after, I learned that YouTube Music does not allow music export from the service, so it was a good idea that I pulled a backup before Google Play Music was completely terminated. I would hate to have lost such an enormous collection of mp3 files. Even if it was just a single folder with nearly 36,000 music files, all of my music was accounted for.
Once Google Play Music was dead and gone, I discovered that there were several tools available for a more complete export of data. The first party service only downloaded the mp3 files themselves. Some utilities stored the likes, dislikes, playlists, and other user data. I didn’t know this until it was too late, and now, neither do you. Just know, this could have been significantly easier before Google actually pulled the plug. In any case, all I truly needed was the collection of mp3 files.
The migration from Google Play Music to YouTube Music included playlists and likes. Or… it was at least supposed to. Some of the likes translated, but most did not. The ones that did translate didn’t seem to accomplish the same result as likes in YouTube Music. The auto playlist of likes in Google Play Music could be shuffled locally without a subscription. What appeared to be the analog feature in YouTube Music could only be played with a subscription, since the contents were the service equivalent of the same songs. I assume that means that the likes that did translate were the ones that Google Play Music had a server match with. It was vastly insufficient for what I wanted.
In addition to that initial gripe with the playlists, I learned more and more that YouTube Music did not have feature parity with Google Play Music. Many behaviors that I used in Google Play Music were not present. Furthermore, YouTube Music really pushes subscription content over user uploaded content. If you search for a song title, album title, or artist, the initial results are from YouTube Music. To see your own content that matches the search string, you have to switch to the library tab. Numerous forum threads have discussed the various features lacking from YouTube Music, both those I was aware of, and some that I did not yet realize. Clearly, it had some issues.
Because I hated using YouTube Music at all, I decided to investigate some other options. One of the large contenders seemed to be iTunes match. My initial understanding was that it appeared to be very similar to Google Play Music, where users could upload their own music files and stream them from other devices signed in with the same account. Turns out, it allows users to download their music to other devices, but only songs that could be matched against the iTunes store. It does not support streaming, most of my music is not available on iTunes, and the matching is only available on Apple devices and Windows. Pass.
Enter Plex
I continued looking, and found where some previous Google Play Music users had started listening to their own music from a Plex server. Now that was a curious idea. I could create my own server and keep all my music hosted locally. Plex was specifically designed to manage that sort of data access, so I should be able to get everything up and running pretty easily.
The more I investigated, the better Plex sounded. It was my own music files, no need to match against some other service’s contents. The bitrate could be as high as I wanted. Most of my stuff is ripped to 320 kbps mp3, which is already higher quality than many PAID streaming services, but I could go even further and start ripping to FLAC. No song limits, no compatibility issues.
I already had the music files, I just needed a way to access them. (Un)fortunately, my wife’s laptop hinge died within a few weeks before this idea came to me. It sucked buying a new PC for her, but the fact that we had a perfectly working laptop that just wouldn’t open/close properly was perfect for what I needed. I could install Plex, load up my media, and stick the laptop next to my router. The laptop would most likely have just been sitting in my garage with some other old hardware otherwise, so it was nice to be able to breathe some new life into it.
It was decided. I copied off any good data to my external drive, wiped the HDD on the laptop, and reinstalled Windows. Once everything was fresh, I downloaded the Plex server installer and got that operating. I dumped my music onto the drive in the music folder. The configuration process was a little opaque, and I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. Access from outside my home network didn’t seem to be working right, and the Plex documentation pointed out that you may need a static IP on the server machine and port forwarding. If nothing else, those seemed like they should make troubleshooting and maintenance easier later on. With a little Google-fu and some intuition, I got the static IP in place.
Port forwarding was a little more difficult. I assumed it would need to be done at the router level, and that concerned me a little. I got the router for Christmas 2017, and hadn’t changed any of the settings since I first got it set up. Therefore, the firmware was nearly 3 years out of date. Before I really did any tinkering, it seemed like a good idea to get the firmware current. I hit the update button and let it run.
The router restarted a few times during the firmware update process. Once it was finished, the router booted back up, but there was no internet connection. This would have been no big deal, except I was working from home and this happened during mid afternoon. In a mild panic, I restarted the router by hand to no avail. After a few attempts, I decided to do a hard restart of the entire system. Fortunately, that sorted everything out, and the internet connection was back up. I managed to get port forwarding configured pretty easily after that within the router console, so that was the least of my worries.
Load It Up
The Plex server was finally available from outside my home network. However, connecting to the server doesn’t accomplish much if there is no media on it. I had moved my music onto the file system several days before, and Plex was already looking at the folder with all of the mp3 files in it. For all intents and purposes, it should have finished by then. Oddly, the only album that showed up on my server was the 2015 Warped Tour Compilation. Stranger still, the UI would crash every time I tried to open the album. If I shuffled my collection, however, it would play music.
It occurred to me that perhaps everything had associated with the same album. Enough time had passed that all of my music should have appeared in its appropriate location. If Plex reads by folder in the file structure (it does), all of that music would have been grouped together. This theory made even more sense as an answer for why the UI would crash when accessing the album, but Plex could still play songs. I uploaded almost 36,000 songs and Plex saw it as a single album. The fix would be pretty simple, I just had to split the music into artist and album folders. I wasn’t doing that manually, though.
Surely, in the wide world of software, there would be a utility that could organize my music files. I started with the usual suspects that I knew of. Media Monkey does have the ability to organize files, but only the premium version. I didn’t want to spend $25 for a single piece of software, especially when I wouldn’t be using it for media consumption anyway. This would be a one time task (ideally), and I didn’t think Media Monkey would be the only software capable of such a straightforward task.
As I looked into other options, I discovered that foobar2000 promoted the same ability. Plus, it’s free. Plus, I’ve used it before and I was decently familiar with the interface. I downloaded it, imported my library, and started tinkering around with the settings. It wasn’t exactly obvious how to access or use the file maintenance utility, so I looked up a lot of tutorials and specific use cases. I didn’t want to jack up my collection, but something had to be done.
Eventually, I found the template profiles that foobar2000 had straight out of the box. These profiles could automatically move files into the appropriate folder, and change the track title, which would help identify specific songs. That was exactly what I needed, and it didn’t need any sort of regular expression configuration.
After looking over the preview, things seemed mostly in order. I ran the utility and checked in after it was finished. The file system appeared right, so I assumed it should play nice with Plex. Albums started showing up in the Plex interface, which was confirmation enough for me. My collection still looked more sparse than I remembered after a few hours, but I chalked that up to the different UI.
When searching for individual songs or artists, I was still showing a lot of results in the 2015 Warped Tour album. Weird, I thought that was fixed. As I searched for more specific results, I noticed that a lot of things were missing. Even just the high points with things I listen to most frequently, there were many notable omissions. No Trivium, even though I have several of their albums. No Aaron Lewis, and I have two of his. I checked my file structure, and the songs and artists were where they belong. I refreshed Plex, and nothing changed.
Tear It Down
In a moment of genius, I thought of a fool-proof fix. I moved the actual 2015 Warped Tour folder from my music folder into another area. I then went into Plex and deleted that album. My expectation was that Plex would try to delete the album unsuccessfully, and then remove that album from the interface. I could then move the folder back in, refresh my library, and it should show up with only the tracks contained in the folder.
I should have taken a backup before I pressed delete. Unfortunately, I was too confident in my assumption, and I did not. When I looked in the recycle bin, a lot of files were showing up. These files were the same songs that Plex had marked as part of the album, even though the files had been moved to their respective artists and albums. Somehow, Plex had maintained that new location in memory, and deleted them no matter where they were. I tried to restore the files, but the recycle bin crashed. My only option was to wait and restore everything after Plex finished deleting it.
Once new files stopped showing up in the recycle bin, I assumed the carnage was complete. It ended up being about 6,000 songs that were deleted. I restored them all, and started making sure that everything looked right. Some albums were missing a few songs. Apparently, trying to restore while the system was still deleting files had caused a few to get permanently lost. Fortunately, I could use my original backup from Google Play Music and start over fresh. I moved the remaining Plex music into a folder of its own, a nearly pointless backup, but a backup nonetheless.
Start It Over
Just to be safe, I deleted the entire music library from Plex. Any residual data might cause issues, so starting fresh with an empty file system and no path or library should remove any external influences. I moved my Google Play Music backup into a folder in my documents. I ran the foobar2000 utility again. Once that was finished and my files were sorted into folders, I pulled a backup onto my external drive (like I should have done before).
I had to track down a few albums that were acquired after my Google Play Music export. Otherwise, everything looked right. With nothing else I could think of that might cause problems, I added the library back into Plex. Immediately, music started showing up in the interface. The lists of artists and albums were much larger, more in line with what I anticipated. I searched for several one-off songs, and each of them seemed to show up in the proper album by the proper artist.
Now that everything is in place, I have copied my music library to my external drive. Every few months, I want to copy a new backup over and delete the old one, just so that I always have a music collection that is reasonably current. If something did go wrong, I want to have a recent enough backup so that I don’t lose much, if anything. Plus, having the files organized into folders should make the collection much easier to navigate manually, should I have to.
Using Plex
The end goal was to create a means of listening to my music, and Plex manages that perfectly. Even without the Plex Pass subscription service, there are a ton of awesome features. In addition to normal playlists, you can create playlists that automatically populate based on filtering criteria. As you add music to your library that meets those criteria, it immediately goes into the playlist as well.
Case in point, Plex uses a 5-star rating system. You can filter your library based on that rating, either matching a specific rating, or anything higher or lower than a certain value. I created a playlist to include any songs rated higher than 3 stars. When I rate a new song either 4 or 5 stars, it adds to the playlist. If I decide that I don’t like the song that much and drop the rating to 3 or lower, it is removed from the playlist. I can then shuffle that playlist, much the same way that I used the thumbs up playlist from Google Play Music, and get a varied queue of music that I like.
So far, I have very few complaints about Plex as a music service. Furthermore, it handles movies and TV shows equally well. Eventually, this might replace Netflix and Amazon Prime Video for me, too. For now, I don’t yet have enough of a robust video collection. However, that’s a problem on my end. As I build my own collection, Plex becomes more of a contender, and for absolutely no monthly fee.
If you were burned by Google Play Music like me and want to host your own music, Plex is an option. It can be a huge pain to set up, the app isn’t perfect, and the burden is on you to maintain it. However, if you want all of your media in a single place, Plex is about the only option. In my opinion, it is easily worth effort.
Sources:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63901269/how-to-move-from-google-play-music-to-plex-music
https://www.ryananddebi.com/2019/08/26/plex-how-to-create-smart-auto-updating-music-playlists/
Disclaimer: A word to the wise, fix your music folder before you ever bother with the Plex side of things. There are several tools and utilities I have discussed below, but everything is going to work much better if you get the music file structure right first. Everything should be divided into artist, and further divided into album. A free utility called foobar2000 can do that for you, if you take some time to tinker with it. AFTER the file structure of your music is right, THEN download and install the Plex server. If you need to set up a static IP and port forwarding, you can configure that all later. Be wary of my mistake, though, you want the music file structure to be pristine before you try to import it into Plex. Now, onto the ordeal I faced.
I’ve been a power user of Google Play Music since almost the beginning. At least as far back as January 2013, I have an email where I suggested a change to the interface, so I assume it was around then that I first started using the service. It first launched in November 2011, so I picked it up within about a year. I uploaded my entire music collection immediately.
For years, it was my main method of music consumption. I used the Android app and the desktop site. I made my own playlists, and took advantage of the automatic playlists that populated with thumbs up rated music and most recently added tracks. If I bought new digital music, it was exclusively from the Play store. If I bought physical CD music, I ripped it to my PC and uploaded it automatically. If there was something that Google Play Music could do, I probably knew about it, and I took advantage of most of its features.
When Google announced the launch of YouTube Music, I knew it would mean they were cancelling Google Play Music. It had to happen eventually. Google can’t leave good products alone, and they have to kill off pretty much all of their products at some point. Sure enough, they did announce that Google Play Music would be coming to an end, replaced fully by YouTube Music. I wasn’t happy about the decision, but I figured it would be fine. Surely, I would learn to appreciate YouTube Music just as much as I had its predecessor.
As Google Play Music was winding down, Google allowed the option to automatically migrate user uploaded libraries to a YouTube Music account. That was awfully kind of them. Just to be safe, though, I decided to manually export my collection one more time. Soon after, I learned that YouTube Music does not allow music export from the service, so it was a good idea that I pulled a backup before Google Play Music was completely terminated. I would hate to have lost such an enormous collection of mp3 files. Even if it was just a single folder with nearly 36,000 music files, all of my music was accounted for.
Once Google Play Music was dead and gone, I discovered that there were several tools available for a more complete export of data. The first party service only downloaded the mp3 files themselves. Some utilities stored the likes, dislikes, playlists, and other user data. I didn’t know this until it was too late, and now, neither do you. Just know, this could have been significantly easier before Google actually pulled the plug. In any case, all I truly needed was the collection of mp3 files.
The migration from Google Play Music to YouTube Music included playlists and likes. Or… it was at least supposed to. Some of the likes translated, but most did not. The ones that did translate didn’t seem to accomplish the same result as likes in YouTube Music. The auto playlist of likes in Google Play Music could be shuffled locally without a subscription. What appeared to be the analog feature in YouTube Music could only be played with a subscription, since the contents were the service equivalent of the same songs. I assume that means that the likes that did translate were the ones that Google Play Music had a server match with. It was vastly insufficient for what I wanted.
In addition to that initial gripe with the playlists, I learned more and more that YouTube Music did not have feature parity with Google Play Music. Many behaviors that I used in Google Play Music were not present. Furthermore, YouTube Music really pushes subscription content over user uploaded content. If you search for a song title, album title, or artist, the initial results are from YouTube Music. To see your own content that matches the search string, you have to switch to the library tab. Numerous forum threads have discussed the various features lacking from YouTube Music, both those I was aware of, and some that I did not yet realize. Clearly, it had some issues.
Because I hated using YouTube Music at all, I decided to investigate some other options. One of the large contenders seemed to be iTunes match. My initial understanding was that it appeared to be very similar to Google Play Music, where users could upload their own music files and stream them from other devices signed in with the same account. Turns out, it allows users to download their music to other devices, but only songs that could be matched against the iTunes store. It does not support streaming, most of my music is not available on iTunes, and the matching is only available on Apple devices and Windows. Pass.
Enter Plex
I continued looking, and found where some previous Google Play Music users had started listening to their own music from a Plex server. Now that was a curious idea. I could create my own server and keep all my music hosted locally. Plex was specifically designed to manage that sort of data access, so I should be able to get everything up and running pretty easily.
The more I investigated, the better Plex sounded. It was my own music files, no need to match against some other service’s contents. The bitrate could be as high as I wanted. Most of my stuff is ripped to 320 kbps mp3, which is already higher quality than many PAID streaming services, but I could go even further and start ripping to FLAC. No song limits, no compatibility issues.
I already had the music files, I just needed a way to access them. (Un)fortunately, my wife’s laptop hinge died within a few weeks before this idea came to me. It sucked buying a new PC for her, but the fact that we had a perfectly working laptop that just wouldn’t open/close properly was perfect for what I needed. I could install Plex, load up my media, and stick the laptop next to my router. The laptop would most likely have just been sitting in my garage with some other old hardware otherwise, so it was nice to be able to breathe some new life into it.
It was decided. I copied off any good data to my external drive, wiped the HDD on the laptop, and reinstalled Windows. Once everything was fresh, I downloaded the Plex server installer and got that operating. I dumped my music onto the drive in the music folder. The configuration process was a little opaque, and I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. Access from outside my home network didn’t seem to be working right, and the Plex documentation pointed out that you may need a static IP on the server machine and port forwarding. If nothing else, those seemed like they should make troubleshooting and maintenance easier later on. With a little Google-fu and some intuition, I got the static IP in place.
Port forwarding was a little more difficult. I assumed it would need to be done at the router level, and that concerned me a little. I got the router for Christmas 2017, and hadn’t changed any of the settings since I first got it set up. Therefore, the firmware was nearly 3 years out of date. Before I really did any tinkering, it seemed like a good idea to get the firmware current. I hit the update button and let it run.
The router restarted a few times during the firmware update process. Once it was finished, the router booted back up, but there was no internet connection. This would have been no big deal, except I was working from home and this happened during mid afternoon. In a mild panic, I restarted the router by hand to no avail. After a few attempts, I decided to do a hard restart of the entire system. Fortunately, that sorted everything out, and the internet connection was back up. I managed to get port forwarding configured pretty easily after that within the router console, so that was the least of my worries.
Load It Up
The Plex server was finally available from outside my home network. However, connecting to the server doesn’t accomplish much if there is no media on it. I had moved my music onto the file system several days before, and Plex was already looking at the folder with all of the mp3 files in it. For all intents and purposes, it should have finished by then. Oddly, the only album that showed up on my server was the 2015 Warped Tour Compilation. Stranger still, the UI would crash every time I tried to open the album. If I shuffled my collection, however, it would play music.
It occurred to me that perhaps everything had associated with the same album. Enough time had passed that all of my music should have appeared in its appropriate location. If Plex reads by folder in the file structure (it does), all of that music would have been grouped together. This theory made even more sense as an answer for why the UI would crash when accessing the album, but Plex could still play songs. I uploaded almost 36,000 songs and Plex saw it as a single album. The fix would be pretty simple, I just had to split the music into artist and album folders. I wasn’t doing that manually, though.
Surely, in the wide world of software, there would be a utility that could organize my music files. I started with the usual suspects that I knew of. Media Monkey does have the ability to organize files, but only the premium version. I didn’t want to spend $25 for a single piece of software, especially when I wouldn’t be using it for media consumption anyway. This would be a one time task (ideally), and I didn’t think Media Monkey would be the only software capable of such a straightforward task.
As I looked into other options, I discovered that foobar2000 promoted the same ability. Plus, it’s free. Plus, I’ve used it before and I was decently familiar with the interface. I downloaded it, imported my library, and started tinkering around with the settings. It wasn’t exactly obvious how to access or use the file maintenance utility, so I looked up a lot of tutorials and specific use cases. I didn’t want to jack up my collection, but something had to be done.
Eventually, I found the template profiles that foobar2000 had straight out of the box. These profiles could automatically move files into the appropriate folder, and change the track title, which would help identify specific songs. That was exactly what I needed, and it didn’t need any sort of regular expression configuration.
After looking over the preview, things seemed mostly in order. I ran the utility and checked in after it was finished. The file system appeared right, so I assumed it should play nice with Plex. Albums started showing up in the Plex interface, which was confirmation enough for me. My collection still looked more sparse than I remembered after a few hours, but I chalked that up to the different UI.
When searching for individual songs or artists, I was still showing a lot of results in the 2015 Warped Tour album. Weird, I thought that was fixed. As I searched for more specific results, I noticed that a lot of things were missing. Even just the high points with things I listen to most frequently, there were many notable omissions. No Trivium, even though I have several of their albums. No Aaron Lewis, and I have two of his. I checked my file structure, and the songs and artists were where they belong. I refreshed Plex, and nothing changed.
Tear It Down
In a moment of genius, I thought of a fool-proof fix. I moved the actual 2015 Warped Tour folder from my music folder into another area. I then went into Plex and deleted that album. My expectation was that Plex would try to delete the album unsuccessfully, and then remove that album from the interface. I could then move the folder back in, refresh my library, and it should show up with only the tracks contained in the folder.
I should have taken a backup before I pressed delete. Unfortunately, I was too confident in my assumption, and I did not. When I looked in the recycle bin, a lot of files were showing up. These files were the same songs that Plex had marked as part of the album, even though the files had been moved to their respective artists and albums. Somehow, Plex had maintained that new location in memory, and deleted them no matter where they were. I tried to restore the files, but the recycle bin crashed. My only option was to wait and restore everything after Plex finished deleting it.
Once new files stopped showing up in the recycle bin, I assumed the carnage was complete. It ended up being about 6,000 songs that were deleted. I restored them all, and started making sure that everything looked right. Some albums were missing a few songs. Apparently, trying to restore while the system was still deleting files had caused a few to get permanently lost. Fortunately, I could use my original backup from Google Play Music and start over fresh. I moved the remaining Plex music into a folder of its own, a nearly pointless backup, but a backup nonetheless.
Start It Over
Just to be safe, I deleted the entire music library from Plex. Any residual data might cause issues, so starting fresh with an empty file system and no path or library should remove any external influences. I moved my Google Play Music backup into a folder in my documents. I ran the foobar2000 utility again. Once that was finished and my files were sorted into folders, I pulled a backup onto my external drive (like I should have done before).
I had to track down a few albums that were acquired after my Google Play Music export. Otherwise, everything looked right. With nothing else I could think of that might cause problems, I added the library back into Plex. Immediately, music started showing up in the interface. The lists of artists and albums were much larger, more in line with what I anticipated. I searched for several one-off songs, and each of them seemed to show up in the proper album by the proper artist.
Now that everything is in place, I have copied my music library to my external drive. Every few months, I want to copy a new backup over and delete the old one, just so that I always have a music collection that is reasonably current. If something did go wrong, I want to have a recent enough backup so that I don’t lose much, if anything. Plus, having the files organized into folders should make the collection much easier to navigate manually, should I have to.
Using Plex
The end goal was to create a means of listening to my music, and Plex manages that perfectly. Even without the Plex Pass subscription service, there are a ton of awesome features. In addition to normal playlists, you can create playlists that automatically populate based on filtering criteria. As you add music to your library that meets those criteria, it immediately goes into the playlist as well.
Case in point, Plex uses a 5-star rating system. You can filter your library based on that rating, either matching a specific rating, or anything higher or lower than a certain value. I created a playlist to include any songs rated higher than 3 stars. When I rate a new song either 4 or 5 stars, it adds to the playlist. If I decide that I don’t like the song that much and drop the rating to 3 or lower, it is removed from the playlist. I can then shuffle that playlist, much the same way that I used the thumbs up playlist from Google Play Music, and get a varied queue of music that I like.
So far, I have very few complaints about Plex as a music service. Furthermore, it handles movies and TV shows equally well. Eventually, this might replace Netflix and Amazon Prime Video for me, too. For now, I don’t yet have enough of a robust video collection. However, that’s a problem on my end. As I build my own collection, Plex becomes more of a contender, and for absolutely no monthly fee.
If you were burned by Google Play Music like me and want to host your own music, Plex is an option. It can be a huge pain to set up, the app isn’t perfect, and the burden is on you to maintain it. However, if you want all of your media in a single place, Plex is about the only option. In my opinion, it is easily worth effort.
Sources:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63901269/how-to-move-from-google-play-music-to-plex-music
https://www.ryananddebi.com/2019/08/26/plex-how-to-create-smart-auto-updating-music-playlists/
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