Words On Wednesday

It’s that time of year. Not Christmas, it’s Plex Day. We’re now four years in since I  started using Plex in 2020, and my use case has certainly evolved in that time. It’s still my main music platform, and I’ve started using it more for video as well. We still have some streaming services (namely YouTube TV and Netflix), but I’ve gradually started shifting from Prime Video and Hulu after we canceled those subscriptions. Netflix has enough exclusives that the kids like, and until Plex gets college football, I’m going to need some sort of cable TV source. Hardware Last year , I was still up in the air about DVD piracy. The Surface Pro 6 I was using for the server didn’t have a disc drive, so I was considering buying a USB Blu-ray drive. I had also brought my old desktop out of storage, which I was considering migrating the whole server to, but I hadn’t yet booted it back up. My hand was eventually forced when the kids asked to watch something that wasn’t on any streaming services we...

I wrote about Plex on December 16, 2020 and again on December 15, 2021 . Therefore, the third Wednesday in December is Plex day from now on. I stubbed out a post for 2022, but I was at a weird point in my life then and never got around to writing it. Fortunately, I just finished school and now I have a little bit of free time again. Hence, Plex Day 2023. At the end of 2020, I was just getting started with Plex. I suffered through the issues with getting my music collection organized into a folder structure that plays well with Plex Media Server. At that time, it wasn’t that I was passionate about Plex as a platform, I was just looking for something to replace Google Play Music (Pour one out for the homies). By December 2021, I was a little more sold on Plex. In fact, I had purchased the lifetime Plex Pass in August 2021, I was just really ahead on writing posts and that post didn’t publish until December. In either case, I was making a gamble. If I bought a lifetime Plex Pass and ende...

Plex offers a premium tier for a paid subscription, the Plex Pass, and I’m almost tempted to bite because of their latest music app. Part of what drew me to Plex originally was the ability to listen to my own music, from the internet, without paying any sort of regular subscription fee. No ads like YouTube Music, no limited selection like Amazon Music, just me and my tunes. Sure, they offered a paid subscription for some fancy frills, but it wasn’t anything I needed. I used Plex for several months without any bit of interest in a Plex Pass. The web version on desktop worked perfectly. On mobile, it was a little less ideal. The first-party Plex app is fine for video, but it kinda chokes on music. It takes forever to actually recognize my library when I’m not on my home network, and will randomly stop playing after two or three songs if my screen is off. This is after I paid five bucks for that unlock, mind you. For whatever reason, the app continues playing just fine when connected to A...

In the context of rating systems, I’ve recently been pondering the difference between thumbs up and thumbs down versus five star styles. When I discussed my use case for Plex a little while back, I mentioned how the star rating system for songs and dynamic playlists allowed me to have effectively the same functionality as Google Play Music and its thumbs up playlist. I tell the system that I like a song, and I can shuffle the collection of all songs that I like. Pretty simple, and they both do that job very well. However, that doesn’t really tell the full story. The part where I tell the system what songs I like? That’s actually an enormous undertaking. My music library has a ton of tracks. Currently, it sits at 34340 items, and that continues to grow week after week. I can’t guarantee that I’ve even listened to all of those tracks (confession: I definitely haven’t), let alone considered each of them long enough to give it an informed rating. There are a couple ways that I could go ab...

The music died on July 1, 2021. Well, at least that’s when Spartanburg County Public Libraries stopped carrying music CDs in circulation. I know Don McLean was referring to February 3, 1959  when Buddy Holly and others died in a plane crash. I don’t mean to trivialize that event. But for me personally, it was a huge blow to my music consumption to hear that my local library wouldn’t have music on CD anymore. The lion’s share of music in my personal collection has come from the public library for a long time now. I would check out a music CD, bring it back to my desk at work, rip the album to my company-provided computer, and return the disc that afternoon or the next day. Was I supposed to be saving music from county-owned discs? Probably not, but I also wasn’t doing anything to profit off them, so I figured it wasn’t that bad. This process went on for several years. I started doing it some time in the late 2000s, but it really hit stride between 2012 and 2019 during my years at Q...

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 J...

When I say “rock music,” you say… Lorde? At least that’s what people said about “Royals” back in 2014 when it won the VMA for Best Rock Video . I understand that was 3 years ago, and people made plenty of jokes soon after, but it still stands as a shining example of how rock as a genre has had its lines blurred to the point that it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Even the other nominees for the rock category seem like a stretch. Imagine Dragons, Arctic Monkeys, and The Black Keys all fit into a weird area of… yeah, I guess I could maybe call it rock, but it’s more of like an indie sort of rock. The only nominee in 2014 that I would genuinely consider rock would have been Linkin Park, but I certainly wouldn’t have considered them the only rock band with a song in the running for “Best Rock Video” of that year. What is Rock Music? Suffice it to say, “rock music” doesn’t mean much anymore. I understand that with all the sub-genres and combinations within rock, it does encompass a rat...

Thanksgiving day is tomorrow, and despite Christmas music on the radio and decorations up all over the place, it is still a celebrated holiday. I understand that Christmas is a lot easier to get excited for than Thanksgiving. For one, it has tons and tons of music. I don’t have any sort of tentative figures on it, but I’m sure there are hundreds if not thousands of Christmas songs just in English. How many songs have you ever heard about Thanksgiving. In addition to the music, Christmas decorations are as prolific and varied as holidays get. There are trees and ribbons and lights and garland and even flying spaghetti monster tree toppers. With so many decorations available, you can doll up your house and yard however you want. The sky's the limit, often literally with the size of some Christmas trees I’ve seen. Let’s not forget presents. The holiday season brings people out of the woodwork to go shopping, and companies often hold off new releases until late in the year, just...