This weekend I spent a large chunk of time setting up Plex Media Center for OS X on my shiny new Mac Mini. When I left for work this morning, after two weeks off, I expected to get to the office and fire up iTunes to listen to my music from home using Simplify Media like normal.
Everything was working fine, if a bit slower than I expected, for the first hour or so, then unexpectedly Simplify Media simply quit working. Restarting the application didn’t help. Restarting iTunes didn’t help. Restarting the computer didn’t help. No matter what I did Simplify Media decided to be stuck in the initializing mode.
After toying with somethings on my iMac at home after work, I realized what was different in the setup than before Christmas break. The difference was that I am now running the Plex Media Server (PMS) component of Plex on the iMac to server the iTunes library up to the media center Mac Mini in the living room. After stopping PMS and restarting Simplify Media everything worked fine. With Simplify Media stopped and PMS restarted Plex was working fine.
After looking into the preferences of Simplify Media, I noticed the ability to turn off Simplify Media for the local network. After checking that box and restarting both PMS and Simplify Media everything is green again in the Simplify Media land.
I am not quite sure why they are conflicting. A comment in a post on elan’s Plex blog clued me into checking the Plex UPnP code to make sure it was disabled. I looked into that and I definitely have it disabled.
Update (2010-1-6) – According to the Simplify Media blog page, they are having network problems in their data center.
Mine did the exact same thing. Today it was working fine then out of no where it quit and stuck on initializing as well. I am pretty sure they are not conflicting as i dont have this program. I also got a message from simplify media at one point saying it was a technical problem on their end. It is 2:00am on jan 6 and it still is not working.
Hope a solution comes soon!!
I also just setup a new mac mini media center with Plex and Simplify Media. I thought Simplify Media was buggy and unreliable, but maybe it’s just a conflict with Plex. Thanks!
My Simplify is still down. Same generic message on their Support page. Is anyone’s Simplify working right now? This is a pretty lame response on Simplify’s part to this outage.