Quite a while back I settled on Plex as my media server. I have thousands of MP3s, thousand of photos, plus personal videos and even ripped movies and TV shows from DVDs. I happen to use my Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu as a server, but Plex works with most popular platforms. You pay for the server, and clients are free.

We mostly listen to music on Amazon Alexa using Spotify these days or just stream WWOZ using Alexa and TuneIn. I thought it would be nice to be able to listen to my old MP3s on Alexa, since the alternative is using the Apple TV Plex client. Not a huge hassle, but not as easy as Alexa. I recall trying this a while back, unsuccessfully. The Alexa plugin still gets poor reviews and two stars, but thought I would give it a try.

With instructions from Plex, got it working almost immediately. Now I can just say Alexa, ask Plex to play music by John Coltrane and it works!