NOT CLICKBAIT! 🙂
Complimentary Video below – also read the whole Blog, lots of details you will need…
I used to have Tidal / and honestly it is not a bad service and the price is also acceptable to pay in my opinion, so this is not to shit on them, but an alternative. I have a lot of CDs and Vinyl, I love to collect physical media as long as I like the music.
And I have purchased also a lot of Hi-Res files music as well, but I wanted to host it my self. For a while I did that exactly, my local streamer picked it up nicely and it was great, but once I cancelled my Tidal subscription to save money – I was missing the play anywhere ability, in my car or on my bike ride, anywhere really…
I remember seeing a youtube video that said the PLEX Amp music app can play remotely too, and frankly I guess since I was using Tidal – I didn’t think to invest too much time into setting that up – but as a life long geek I wanted to try that, so this is that story.
Since all my music is CD quality or better, it really is Hi-Res local streaming.
I have two servers actually:
1- a QNAP Linux NAS Server that does all my local movies/music – not setup to the outside World.
2- and another Dell Server setup with TrueNAS (so Linux too), granted this setup is a bit different and the interface as well… so this is the machine I setup another Plex server and here is where it was setup to do the remote access to my App that is installed on my iPhone. From here I can cast the music to anywhere, my Car’s stereo or headphones or bluetooth speaker on my bike rides…
I figured it would be a quick weekend project. It ended up being a real lesson in home networking, but everything works now, and I tested it properly, streaming music over Bluetooth on a bike ride with zero dropouts. Here’s what actually happened, step by step, in case it saves someone else some time.
By the way, it took about an hour to do from nothing to a fully working Personal streaming service!
Step 1: Get your media folder connected to Plex
If your music or movies live on a different device than the one running Plex, you need to connect the two. In my case, my music sits on a separate NAS, and Plex runs on a different machine entirely as explained, the QNAP NAS.
The cleanest way to do this is over your home network using NFS, a protocol that lets one device mount another device’s folder as if it were local. Most NAS devices have this built in, you just need to turn it on and tell it which folder to share and who’s allowed to access it.
And in my CASE this made the most sense because I only have to maintain the music files in one place, so again to clarify for my setup:
QNAP NAS Server (has the movies/music) connected over NFS —-> to the TrueNAS Server… so the TrueNAS has no media files on it at all, it is just connected over the NFS Protocol and points to the QNAP server that does, hopefully this makes sense.
Another thing to note, that it is connected as Read only, so no one can change anything and mess with it… or delete it…
Step 2: Create a new library in Plex for the new content
Once Plex can actually see the folder (this took me some trial and error, more on that below), creating the library itself is simple: give it a name, pick the content type (Music, in my case), and point it at the folder – again in my Case it is setup for NFS, but you probably will just point to the folder where your media files for music actually are, so load them up on your server first.
Step 3: Let Plex scan and build your library
This part just takes patience. Plex reads through everything, matches album art, artist info, and metadata. Depending on how much you have, this can take a while in the background. Mine had a few thousand albums, so I just let it run.
Step 4: Turn on Remote Access
This is the setting that actually lets you reach your server from outside your house. It’s in Plex’s settings under Remote Access, and it’s normally a single toggle plus signing into your Plex account.
The tricky part is what happens after you flip that switch, which is where most people (myself included) get stuck.
Step 5: Open the right door on your router (maybe two doors)
For a device outside your home to reach your Plex server, your router needs to know to forward incoming traffic to the right device. This is called port forwarding, and Plex specifically needs port 32400 opened up.
This is the setup on the first Door, the internet ISP Modem, this basically points to the internal WiFi router for additional routing…
This is the setup on the Inside WiFi Router or the 2nd Door after the Comcast modem.
Now your router model/make might be different, but the principal is the same, don’t matter.
Here’s the part that surprised me: if you have an ISP-provided modem/router (like a Comcast gateway) AND a separate WiFi router connected to it, you actually have two layers of network between the internet and your Plex server. That means you may need to set up port forwarding twice, once on each device, or put your ISP’s gateway into “bridge mode” so it stops doing its own routing and just hands everything off to your own router.
What to expect (the hiccups, honestly)
A few things went wrong before this worked, and I think they’re worth mentioning because they’re common, not unusual:
- Permissions on the NAS side. Just because a folder is shared over your network doesn’t mean every protocol has permission to touch it. My NAS had NFS access turned off for that specific folder even though the folder itself existed. Worth checking both that the folder exists AND that it’s actually allowed to be accessed the way you’re trying to access it.
- Two things can’t live in the same spot. I initially tried to mount my new music folder inside the same folder my movies were already using, and it silently didn’t show up. Turned out to be a conflict between two things trying to occupy the same space. Giving the new content its own separate spot fixed it right away.
- Auto-detection isn’t always right. Plex tries to automatically figure out your network setup, and with two routers in the chain, it got confused and reported things as broken when they weren’t. There’s a manual override option for exactly this situation, worth knowing it exists before you assume something’s actually wrong.
None of these were hard to fix once I knew what was actually happening. They just took some digging to find.
Conclusion
The whole thing took an evening longer than I expected, but now I have my entire music collection, along with movies, streaming to my phone anywhere I have a signal. No third-party subscription, no monthly fee, just my own hardware doing exactly what I want it to do.
If you’re thinking about doing this yourself: it’s genuinely doable without being a network engineer, but go in expecting at least one unexpected snag, especially if you have more than one router at home. Check your permissions, give new content its own space, and don’t fully trust auto-detection if you’ve got a more complicated setup like mine.
