I read that you can add theme songs to movies which would be so nice… I love scrolling through plex and listening to the theme songs of tv shows/series but having this option for movies or private videos would be really great. I read that you have to make a folder, for example "Dredd (2012) and in this folder you have the movie, for example “Dredd (2012).mp4” and a “theme.mp3” file, named exactly like this.
i tried with a 3min song, i cropped it to 29sec but no matter what I try (agent → local assets to the top, etc.), I can’t here the music.
I use the PLEX MOVIE Scanner and Agent by the way… so this is not the problem
Am I missing something or does anyone else have the same issue and has found a solution?
Thank you for the reply but I read that it is possible for movies too, when you use the NEW scanner/agent called “Plex Movie”. Could the plex docs be not up to date?
Interesting. I just tested this and it worked for me. In order for my theme.mp3 file to be recognized, I only needed to “Refresh Metadata” for the movie to which I had added it. It did take a few seconds for the theme music to start when viewing the pre-play screen, but it did play.
[Edit]
I only tested with the web client and so don’t know how well it works with others.
I remember having trouble with some themes when I started creating my own files.
The support article on submitting themes to Plex mentions a few technical restrictions, some of which seem to refer to fair-use (max. 30 seconds). The others mention the bitrate should be between 128-256 kbps and sample rate should be 44.1 kHz.
I’ve created a conversion profile in VLC that’s only taking the audio track from a clip and converts it to mp3 w/ 256 kbps (never had any trouble with the sample rates)
I am adding theme.mp3 to my series by default.
In my experience, it doesn’t matter whether you use 44.1 kHz or 48kHz. So you can keep the sample rate of the source.
(which would be 48kHz as that is the default SR of audio streams in video files. It is best to avoid unnecessary SR conversions in general.)
I’ve also added a few regular 44.1 kHz rips from sound track CDs to a movie and there is no difference in behaviour or sound to 48kHz.
The restriction to 30 seconds and 256 kbps is solely due to “fair use” for submitting theme music to Plex central. You can use the maximum mp3 bitrate of 320kbps for your local files.
If you use local files, you can also use full-length tracks.
(though ripping a whole sound track CD as a contiguous file is stretching it, so I’d rather avoid doing that )
I’m using XMedia Recode. Simply because I’m also using it to prepare the stereo mixdown for my rips. For simplicity I am converting the whole episode to mp3 and then use mp3DirectCut to crop the result to just the theme song.
It’s not necessary to use the API. Just place the theme.mp3. It works for both tv shows and movies – as long as you use the default agents and not the deprecated ones.
Ahh, I forgot about them. Yes, in this case your only option is indeed the API. However, this is far from officially supported, so there might be … side effects.
)
- and kill_stream.py and working great!
