I’ve never succeeded in loading my 70,000-track library on an iOS device.

But trying to load a library on an iOS device is execrable if you have a library of any size. You can share to an Apple TV, you can share music to iTunes running on another Mac or Windows PC, and you can (theoretically) use Home Sharing on iOS devices. Home Sharing on other devicesĪpple’s Home Sharing obviously only works on Apple devices. There aren’t that many videos yet, but it’s still a nice addition. If you buy a Plex Pass, you can access music videos from Vevo when you view an artist’s page, or an album or song list. For some artists, Plex displays a bright red last.fm graphic telling me to “Use correct artist name in your files’ ID3 tags.” Let’s just say that, for managing a music library, Plex isn’t really ideal, at least not if you’ve been maintaining your library in iTunes. When it doesn’t, it lists, for example, John Mellencamp 26 times, and for Arnold Schönberg shows a photo and biography of Glenn Gould. One of Plex’s features is that it pulls down artist pictures, biographies, and more from last.fm. But if you make new playlists in Plex, they don’t sync back to iTunes. ITunes Home Sharing lets you play all the playlists you’ve created in iTunes, or on your iOS device (if you use iCloud Music Library), and Plex lets you import your iTunes playlists. Unfortunately, Plex transcodes lossless FLAC files to 256 kbps AAC files when sending them to the Apple TV. It transcodes files from formats that can’t play natively on the Apple TV and plays the others directly. Plex, as expected, lets you play FLAC files, but also Ogg Vorbis and others (but it can’t play protected AAC files from the iTunes Store).

You can convert these to Apple Lossless format to add to your iTunes library, you cannot play them natively. However, this solution only lets you play files in AAC, MP3, Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV formats. You can also access Apple Music, if you’re a subscriber, and your iCloud Music Library, if you use this with Apple Music and/or iTunes Match.

As expected, iTunes Home Sharing lets the Apple TV access your iTunes library.

Plex media server apple tv