In theory, any app should be able to use symlinks as they are intended, but Apple tend to screw this up with e.g. iTunes that won't fully work correctly with symlinks. Does Plex?
I have a lot of (video) media stored in folders by iTunes and I'd like to maintain that, but for TV Shows the folder structure and naming is not the same as PMS wants. If I created a clone of that library folder but with better naming for PMS and using symlinks for the media files (that would then have the PMS compatible filenames), would PMS work perfectly with those symlinks and read them exactly as if they were the real files in that folder specified for the Library - as it should, but just want to confirm after wasting much time due to iTunes failures with such configurations.
The alternative would be to give PMS the real files and symlinks to iTunes, but that's where the problems start as iTunes will read, but not write to the real file via symlinks. However PMS doesn't need to write to the file and anyway, is likely to deal with symlinks properly.
Does it?
Of course I could use hard links as they'd be on the same filesystem and then there could be no problem, but it may be trickier maintaining some sort of synchronisation between them. Have to think about that, but would help to know if PMS would work with symlinked files.