Over the years, many people have asked how to connect the Time Machine to their personal music collection. We have finally found a way to do this, using Plex (https://app.plex.tv/) to organize and serve your collection. Plex is free, and it uses metadata tags to help organize your data. 

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This guide explains how to connect the Time Machine to Plex and how Plex albums must be formatted so they are recognized as live music shows. This is a new feature, so please report issues to help@spertilo.net

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The Time Machine only scans Plex libraries that are:

- Added through the Plex setup menu in the device UI
- Music libraries (Plex section type `artist`)

 

Connecting to Plex

1. Open the configuration menu (long-press the Power button).
2. Open Plex setup.
3. Choose Add Library.
4. If Add Server appears, choose Add Account if needed, enter your Plex username/password, and then choose your server.
5. Choose the music library section you want to use.
6. Repeat Add Library if you want additional Plex libraries.
7. Choose Continue to save and exit.

Notes:

- You can review current selections with Show Libraries.
- You can remove a library with Delete Library.
- The Plex account can be removed with Delete Account.

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Required Album Format for Live Music Detection

An album is treated as a live show only if its album title contains a valid ISO date.

For my collections, I name the Plex album like this: YYYY-MM-DD, Venue, City, State. This is sure to work, but the system is a little more flexible. These are the requirements:

Required date format:

- YYYY-MM-DD (preferred)
- YYYY_MM_DD (also accepted)

The date can appear at the beginning or later in the title, but it must be a valid calendar date string of length 10.

 

Accepted title examples:

- 1977-05-08 Barton Hall, Ithaca, NY
- 1977_05_08 - Cornell University
-- Grateful Dead 1977-05-08 Barton Hall
- 1989-10-16 Meadowlands (SBD)

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Not accepted title examples

- 5-8-77 Barton Hall (not ISO)
- 1977/05/08 Barton Hall (slashes are not accepted)
- Cornell University Show (no date)

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Supported Audio Types

Playable tracks are discovered from:

- MP3 (.mp3)
- OGG (.ogg)
- FLAC (.flac, streamed via Plex transcode URL) -- flac transcoding can lead to problems. Please report issues if you have them, hopefully we can fix them.

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