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.

X.gov

I can only remember one 45 minute outage caused by Comcast in 4 years at my house, before that I can’t even remember one. The rest of the time it’s been storms/power - things that would knock out other wireline providers. People shit on Comcast, but it’s plenty reliable these days. I’ll just use my phone’s hotspot and save the $4800 over 4 years.

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.

Wasn’t it ARM doing the licensing shenanigans here? I’ve got no real skin in the game for either, but companies with IP to license seem to have become a commodity, and price themselves out of practicality. For that reason I tend to like when they lose their battles. On this one specifically, I was hoping for Qualcomm to win, but only because they’re cranking out these incredible laptop processors, showing Intel what a windows laptop on ARM can be - fast, cool, all day battery.

I’m not sure I could see a significant number of enterprises switching to Mac, it’s just too tall of an order. My department definitely wouldn’t have the bandwidth to do controls, policies, service desk retraining, and internal app rewrites.

Personally I have switched to Mac and am very happy. The performance, OS, and power efficiency of the Macs are just excellent. I’ll likely never give up my Android phone.

How many more times am I going to see this same title before X implodes?