Been using it for years, but always in a “put it on a drive and hope Plex can organise it” kinda way.
Now that I have more time at home I have been cleaning up my content but hit a small snag.
I have thousands of comedy clips and recordings I would love Plex to serve up to me. A bulk of these happen to be local radio programs that are not listed in the trackers, and I have been trying to work out a methodology to organise them.
My idea was to have them under :
Album: (show name)
Artist (Name of hosts)
That’s my plan but I am totally open to using another convention if someone has already tackled this issue.
I have also been wondering if I need to modify the Metatag info in the MP3 clips to get this to work? I tried some tests, but Plex could not organise the files once I changed the metatags so yeah… trying to work out how to do this.
Would really appreciate some help with this and would love to learn, so thanks in advance.
I’ve got a bunch of old radio programs in Plex. I organized them into folders first by artist, then under that by program, and then under that, by year, mimicking the artist-album-song hierarchy. I used an app called “Tag Editor” (for Mac) to bulk edit the in-file metadata. I created a separate Plex library for them, and told Plex to look in the enclosing folder for the library. As I recall, I think Plex was able to pick up on all this, but I still had to use the pencil icon in Plex to go in and fix stuff a lot, like files that were orphaned and had to have their metadata tweaked through the Plex interface to force them into one of the “albums.” This was a lot of work. I’m unclear on whether Plex uses the in-file metadata or keeps its own, because one time I moved the files to another disk and it caused much uproar and rework.
So folder structure e.g.:
Jack Benny (folder) > Jack Benny Show (subfolder) > 1936 Jack Benny Show (subsubfolder) > 1936-03-24 Jack Takes a Vacation (mp3 file)
Metadata for each clip e.g.:
Album artist: Jack Benny
Album: 1936 Jack Benny Show
Title: 1936-02-24 Jack Goes on Vacation
Track: 2
This shows up and plays correctly in Plex. “1936 Jack Benny Show” gets its own album cover in the Plex interface, with the episodes as songs. Of course I had to keep going in and fixing typos. There doesn’t appear to be a facility for custom hierarchies.
Wanted to ask you a quick question. You mentioned that you “told Plex to look in the enclosing folder for the library”.
Are you talking about scanning the library? If not, can you walk me through the process or give me a heads up into what options within Plex can be used to create this option?
Sorry, my unclear writing. I should have said, Select the newly created library on the left, then Actions (three dots in upper left) > Manage Library > Add Folders, and point Plex at the all-encompassing folder where the new folders, subfolders and files are, then Actions > Scan Library Files, so yes, that’s what I was talking about. Cheers. Let me know if it works.
