There are standards like DLNA that let you make a hard drive full of music available to apps and platforms like iTunes/Apple Music, VLC and Sonos on your home network. I finally landed on Plex after going through several different methods for just making my digital music library available inside my house. Moreover, you can let friends and family listen to your music collection, too, if they have a Plex account. The difference is that the music is all yours. That all means you can use Plex pretty much like any music streaming service. But its utility is multiplied by the Plex app, which is available for most major connected TVs and streaming devices, like Apple TV and Roku, iOS and Android, as well as audio-only platforms like Sonos. The simplest way to access your Plex library is with a web browser. Though Plex is most well known for helping people organize and stream their video collections – the platform now even offers free on-demand and live movies and TV – my primary use case is for music. Plex indexes it and makes it available online. At its most basic, you install the Plex server software on a computer – available for Windows, MacOS and most flavors of Linux – where you store your media library. Plex is a free audio and video streaming platform that was created to let you host and stream your own media collection to just about anywhere on the internet. But in 2021 such a collection is most valuable only if you can listen to it everywhere and every way you might listen to Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music or Tidal. Whether traded, ripped from my own CDs, downloaded in the heydays of – which for a time served up all-you-can-download music from mostly independent labels for a reasonable monthly fee – or purchased direct from artists or on Bandcamp, I’ve amassed a pretty substantial, and idiosyncratic digital music library.īecause I worked in IT and can be a little obsessive, I’ve also done a pretty good job of holding onto this collection, backed up in many ways across CD-Rs, then spare hard drives and, now, the cloud. I have been collecting digital music files since the MP3 became a practical storage and transmission format in the late 90s. By Paul Riismandel on Septemin Music, Music Sharing
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