Playing music

Media plays anything in your Plex library. Audio is streamed from your own Plex server — Media does not host or store the files, it just knows where they are.

The player

Press play anywhere — a track row, an album, a playlist — and the player appears at the bottom of the window. It survives navigation: browse to another artist, open the charts, go to Settings, and playback continues.

Standard controls: play/pause, next, previous, seek, volume. A queue built from a playlist or an album also offers shuffle and repeat.

If a track will not play

Media first tries to stream the file as-is. If your browser cannot decode that format — FLAC in some browsers, obscure codecs — it automatically retries through a transcode and carries on.

If it still fails, the track is skipped and the failure is recorded as unplayable rather than as a dislike. That distinction matters for radio: a file your browser cannot decode says nothing about your taste, so it does not teach the station anything.

What is playable

Only what is in Plex. Media reconciles many sources, so it knows about releases you do not own — those are browsable but not playable, and an album that shows as linked but not playable usually means the Plex item moved or the server is unreachable. See Canonical records.