As a result, your data remains safe and accessible even if a drive fails. This setup gives you half the NAS’s actual amount of storage for files: For example, a NAS with two 8 TB drives in RAID 1 still has 8 TB of total space available ( equivalent to about 300 Blu-rays), not 16 TB. For most home uses, a two-drive NAS is just right because it protects your data by mirroring the contents of one drive to the other (a configuration known as RAID 1, or a mirrored array). Two drive bays: Hundreds of NAS devices are available, and you can find models with one, two, four, eight, or more drive bays.Enter your account credentials, and select “Allow” at the next page. Visit and select Get Started, then Sign in with Amazon. To rearrange the order of songs, you’ll need to add track numbers to the beginning of your file names in each folder.)Ģ. (Note: My Pod only plays songs in alphabetical order. Create a folder in Google Drive, Dropbox, or Amazon Drive, then share the folder to create a link that you can copy. Users with extensive collections should strongly consider Plex or My Media instead, but My Pod can work for playing a small number of songs in a pinch:ġ. The free version is quite limited, though-you can only store a maximum of 10 tracks-and you must pay $3 per month or $35.50 per year for unlimited links. This website lets you drop in a link to any folder on Dropbox, Google Drive, or Amazon Drive, then play the songs from that folder with a voice command. It also has some of the same restrictions: Whole-home streaming isn’t supported, and you must use specific “Ask My Media…” syntax to start listening.īut My Media does have some advantages: It can index playlists from iTunes and play music by genre, and it also offers a workaround (albeit a somewhat clunky one) for multi-room music playback.įor a quick-and-dirty way to play individual songs or playlists through Alexa, check out My Pod. My Media is similar to Plex, in that it requires setting up a media server device for streaming your music files to the Echo. You can also say “Next track,” “Previous track,” “Pause,” “Play,” and “Stop” without having to say “ask Plex” first.

”Ask Plex to throw down some phat beats.” (Seriously, it works.).

”Tell Plex to play the album ” (This tends to only work if you don’t say the artist’s name as well.).

Plex’s support page has a list of voice commands you can use, but here are some useful ones: Now, you can use Plex to play your music collection on the Amazon Echo.

Home media servers