Music and Musings

I just wanted to share that I've played on some albums that recently released!

The first was The Augusta Symphony's Orchestral Works of Miguel del Aguila. I played principal on The Giant Guitar, and The Fall of Cuzco. Wild horn parts on both!

The second is Floral Portrait’s Eponymous debut. It's got some great parts... essentially if Brian Wilson decided to scrap using the wrecking crew and hired classical musicians!

They were both works that I worked on from the beginning of the pandemic, to being released at the end of it. Floral Portrait, especially, was the last work I had before the pandemic shut everything down.

As the pandemic has continued in the United States, I’ve seen numerous videos of how to use microphones with iPads, computers, and phones to improve audio for online lessons. I do not intend to add to that with this (and subsequent posts). Instead, I hope to show off software and hardware, which can improve both your music-making potential and teaching efficiency.

Imagine if you could share all of your old recordings, including many CDs that likely got one pressing, to your students. You could control their audio quality, and even verify whether a student has listened to the music. I’ve had numerous issues with students listening to bad recordings on youtube, or worse, not listening to a recording at all.

I realize that seems relatively impossible in this current pandemic. However it is possible! To achieve this: I have experimented over the past year with software called Plex.

Plex is a streaming software service, known for two things right now: 1. It is a free ad-supported movie streaming app like Tubi.tv, and 2. It is a software service that allows you to stream your media from the cloud to all your devices. That second part is key to being able to stream music to your students.

Most importantly: it allows you to verify if your students have listened to your music via its “Plex Dash” feature.

Plex’s Dashboard feature (Plex Dash), allows you to see a beautiful interactive log of all activity from your server. This includes verifying to see if your students listened to the right piece of music for your next lesson.

Plex works via two interconnected apps: Plex Media Server (or PMS as you will constantly see on forums), and Plex Media Player. Should you decide to take this advice and stream some of your media to your students, they will only ever see Plex Media Player.

Let us start with Plex Media Server, as this takes the most set up and has the most options in terms of customization. Plex media server is precisely what it aims to be: it turns your computer (or other hardware) into a server. When PMS is running, anyone who has your credentials or you have authorized as a user of the server can stream media like music, movies, or tv shows from that server. What this means is that on whatever computer PMS is installed, it has to be always on and connected to the internet to stream the media to your students. This constant connection sounds hard and likely complex. However, because of the simplicity of the software, this is the only barrier to hosting your own media on the internet. I will provide a more in-depth summary of how to install PMS in a later blog post.

Plex Media player is relatively self-explanatory: it operates like iTunes, Apple Music, or Spotify, and is just a media player for Plex. Students only have to sign up for an account, and the teacher just has to share the libraries with that account for them to start streaming the music. There is a version of PMP on every standard platform, including most major smart TVs, I will also cover how to make an account, make media libraries, and share media in a further post.

To Summarize:

Plex allows you to stream any of your music to your students through its user sharing functions. You can verify that your students listen to the specific media through the apps “Plex Dash” feature. Using this has transformed my teaching during this pandemic, and allows for a perfect way to have a "flipped classroom” within an online learning format.