I’m a huge plex fan for movies and television, but it doesn’t get much use in our household for music, relatively speaking. I’d really love that to change because iTunes has so many limitations but plex doesn’t manage to hit that relatively low bar. I’ve proposed a bunch of individual features in the distant past as have others. Here I’ll present a moderately fleshed out proposal. If implemented, it would, at least for me, make plex the most capable music player around. I suspect that many others would feel the same way.
First, here is my immediate pain point for playlists.
I’d like to be able to make a playlist like this:
- track not heard in the last 12 months
- track genre is not one of (holiday, sound effect, test signal)
- any of the following:
-
- track rating is 3 stars (limit to random 150 tracks)
-
- track rating is > 3 stars (limit to random 1500 tracks)
On iTunes I can do this (with a bit of extra cruft) to generate a smart playlist that has a mix of mostly well liked music plus a smattering of things I may not be familiar with (by default I rate new music 3 stars and then move it up or down from there as I play tracks).
Plex, alas, can’t even begin to do this (or at least I haven’t been smart enough to figure out how). Only the first line works. Tracks lack genre but even filtering on album genre for excluding multiple items doesn’t seem to work). And the last half doesn’t even have a way to be expressed.
That covers the playlist part of the discussion. Now let’s come to metadata. iTunes is rather pathetic when it comes to dealing with music metadata, but, sadly, plex is even less capable. Metadata is so important when dealing with music, for me, even more important than for video because my music collection is vastly larger than my video collection and so metadata is key to finding things. It’s also useful for exploring chains of relationships.
First, some motivations: I listen to a lot of different styles of music, but I am particularly fond of classical and early music. Plex makes dealing with this difficult because the composer tag is ignored on import. Even on genres like rock, the composer field is useful to have.
Plex, like iTunes, doesn’t make any attempt to normalize tracks with multiple artists and genres which forces metadata to be sparser than desired or less useful for browsing as lots of similar entries exist.
Here is what I propose.
At the track level:
Title
Album
Artist (multiple entry)
Rating
Genre (multiple entry)
Composer (multiple entry)
Track number x of y
Disc number x of y
Language (one of the choices here should be ‘instrumental’)
Comments
At the album level:
Title
Title Sort
Album Artist (single instance)
Year
Rating (for the entire album)
Genre (a non-editable field that is a union of the track genre’s in the album)
Language (same idea as album genre)
Compilation
Comments (for the album as a whole)
At the artist level:
Artist:
Artist Sort:
Artist Genre: (a non-editable field for all the tracks containing the union of the genres for that artist or composer or possibly an artist genre and composer genre field or it could be argued that composers shouldn’t factor in for this field and don’t make sense to have their own genre field since the ultimate genre of the song may be far unrelated to the composer’s original intent)
Track artist, album artist and track composers all use the same artists.
I’m not detailing every field that could be here. Things like bio and album art I’ve left out since I don’t think a change is needed. Similarly, things like date added, played etc. I think plex already covers.
With all that let me add an example to illustrate how I think it would work:
Track:
track 3 of 14
disc 1 of 1
title: The Heroes of Longhope
genres: folk, celtic, scottish
artist: Jennifer Wrigley, Hazel Wrigley
album: The Watch Stone
language: instrumental
composer: Ronnie Aim
and for the album
title: The Watch Stone
title sort: Watch Stone, The
album artist: Jennifer & Hazel Wrigley
In the artists list we’d end up with entries for:
Jennifer & Hazel Wrigley
Jennifer Wrigley
Hazel Wrigley
Ronnie Aim
Lastly, plex likes to fill in blank metadata even though I’ve told it not to touch my metadata. This is annoying and has forced me to stick “” values in so Plex won’t try to fill in the blanks. Please don’t do that.
This proposal doesn’t try to solve the problem of dealing with metadata on medley’s in any kind of structured way (mostly an issue for composers). Perhaps worth thinking about, but if we got this far, it would go a long way toward solving the vast majority of the current limitations.
In the players I’d like to see most of that data (or at least have the option to turn it on). When a track plays, show me the artists and genres and composers and years and language as clickable elements so I can explore and possible add other related tracks to the play queue. Show me the rating and allow me to change it with at most two clicks/taps. Ideally one click would be great. Granted this might be hard to fit on a phone screen, but on an tablet, monitor or television there ought to be enough screen real estate to make a decent presentation.
I hope plex will give some serious consideration to this. For me, music is plex’s weakest component. Granted, I probably am more data oriented than most but I suspect a lot of other plex users are the same way. Having good metadata and playlist creation abilities opens up ways to explore the music in a very compelling way.
