Alternate [external] Audio Tracks

I'd love the ability to load external audio tracks for directors commentaries, things like MST3K-style alternate audios, dubs, etc. Sometimes these are in MKV, but sometimes you find them as separate files. Would love to be able to play simultaneously!

What we want

Handle external audio tracks in the same way external subs are handled.

Why it’s useful:

• “I especially want the feature in Plex Cloud because the remuxing solution is a huge pain there as opposed to just uploading an additional audio track.” - user tbianucci
• Think: “Plex Versions”, sometimes all we need is audio in a different format. Creating a plex version of both audio + video uses much more storage space than necessary. Support for external tracks should
  • Allow for the concept of a “plex version” of just audio to exist.
  • let clients auto-select the format which can be decoded locally. The server then only has to remux the video and audio, as opposed to also transcoding audio serverside.

Why we don’t want to remux

My video archive is a direct, lossless rip of my DVD and BD collection. I do not wish to alter the archive. Third party audio tracks of any sort do not belong in the file- they get their own separate file. This keeps things organized, pure, easily sharable, and clearly communicates what extra content is available from a file manager.

This feature would be very useful to manage different film scores for silent movies.

Since you can do this on the fly in VLC, not having this feature makes plex an inferior product.
And since currently 675 Rifftrax tracks and I have 240 DVD commentary tracks on storage, I am not going to remux 900 movies by hand.

I think it would be great for foreign language, for example, spanish or french audio instead.

Any Updates or Progress on this or its just a old dead suggestion ?

I really whish there were any news or progress on this, but I am afraid there aren’t any

who ever gets external audio first, plex or emby, would get my money first. i use kodi on a raspberry pi and does fine for 1080p lossless video and allows me to get tracks that my buddies from other countries and have no issues at all playing the external .ac3 file along side the video. but some tv’s have roku and kodi isnt supported. that is why we have both emby and plex. plex as a primary and emby as a backup since they both transcode which is another main feature i use.

You can try this: https://forums.plex.tv/t/release-external-audio-track-support/390714

This would be great for users that want to keep mkv’s unotuched for several reasons, but need to convert audio tracks from DTS to DD (Samsung TVs from 2018 and later do not support DTS decoding).

Some possible supportive causes, some have already been mentioned -

1. A certain video title has an improved audio source in a different file, may a be a different surround sound mix or a remastered audio track. The feature allow their integration easily
2. The video has a new language track or commentary track, previously not available
3. The system is incapable of correctly decoding existing track, so a custom transcoded or downmixed track can solve many quality issue
4. Doing a downmixing or transcoding of existing multichannel audio, then applying some effects for dialogue clarity or volume normalization is quite common for a little advanced user like me. So, being able to use these modified tracks as external audio files can actually quite handy
5. Finally offloading transcoding job and saving files permanently will reduce redundant server processing load

I hope people still won’t consider it a too advanced feature!

Are we going to celebrate the seven-year anniversary of this feature request this August?

This would be very useful for plex running on low power nas devices or the Nvidia shield. We could convert the tracks to mp3 or aac for mobile as the hardware transcode works on video but the CPU can’t jero up with the audio conversion.

Is the feature considered yet? Any progress?

I’m just amazed that this isn’t already a feature. I expected it to work just like subtitles.

For dubbed audio or commentaries, it just seems like a no brainer.

On another note this could be a useful workaround for the whole Dolby Vision/lossless audio tradeoff that currently exists for dual layer DV content. Have the MP4 and then use makeMKV and have the audio file in an mka file, Plex then pops them together. Just a thought.

Seems like still no progress

I’ve got 4K content that I’ve scaled down to 720p so that I can stream on limited bandwidth without choking my server’s processor in an attempt to transcode that on the fly. Plex allows me to name the files:
Alita- Battle Angel (2019) - UHD.mkv
Alita- Battle Angel (2019) - HD.mkv
And the player recognizes different resolutions of the same movie. Having the audio tracks in their own files would make it so that I don’t have to manually include all of them with every version of the movie. It would also simplify my workflow by allowing me to separate the tracks once and then create however many new encodes without remuxing afterwards.

For the love of everything that is good, please bring this feature to Plex already!!!
With the addition of specifying a delay (positive or negative in milliseconds) for each track file separately.

I, for one, always prefer to watch stuff in their original language (even if I don’t understand it) to get the actor’s punctuation. But having kids, made it necessary for me to get native audio tracks for at least family & animation categories. The lack of this functionality made me use Plex less and less, I’m afraid. If I wasn’t a lifetime subscriber, I might have second thoughts about renewing.

Just my two cents.

+1 for me.

I think all major use-cases are described in this thread. In the end, this is how i.e. youtube is handling different audio and video codecs.

For the more detailed description of my use-case, you could look at my other post here, or check my personal implementation of this.

Given that my implementation burn app. 4 MDs of my time in total, it´s not an show stopper. And also one needs to bear in mind, that majority of the time, I was reverse engineering how Plex is doing its job. And also, if this will be implemented directly inside PMS (Plex Scanner and Media Decision Engine), then it will remove almost every issues and blockers, that I hit on the way.