I have a large collection of music in 8 different genres. Actually, some of the files that technically fit under the “music library” category are not music, but audiobooks. It is confusing to have them appear on the “grid” display intermingled with all the other music. I have determined that PLEX uses “Album Artist” as the basis for organizing the music icons in the “grid” display.
My question is this: What happens to my PLEX home screen should I decide to set up not just one “Music Library” but two (or even three) separate music libraries. I am thinking of putting all the audiobooks in one “Music Library” then all actual music into another separate “Music Library.” I am wondering whether this will work well, or will my “Home Screen” become confused by having too many libraries to all appear at the bottom of the screen. If this worked well, I might set up a third “Music Library” to house all my classical/orchestral/opera music.
Your home screen will be fine. There is no issues with how you want to set things up (in fact, it’s how I have my music and audiobooks). The audiobooks and music will still be together under recently added music, but the libraries themselves will be separate.
When I then go to my PLEX player on my TV, everything appears as I would expect it—with multiple libraries listed down the left side.
However, when I go to my PLEX player on my iPad, I have to select a different “Media Server” to get to each genre. They are, of course, all on the same Media Server, but it seems each of the three music-type libraries identifies as a separate media server choice. This seems odd.
I recall setting up multiple “music libraries” a few weeks ago and they the three genres appeared more as a tabs on the Music page, rather than requiring me to switch to a different media server choice.
The current UI on your iPad is focusing on media types and allows selecting the media type from the bottom of the screen. Within a media type section you can pick a library from the top-left corner/navigation.
This UI works across servers… so within a media type, Plex will display all libraries of that type on servers available to you.
In the past (long, long time ago) you could select a server in the top left corner and then navigate its libraries.
Plex is currently rolling out a new version of its user interface (currently available on Roku or Apple TV). There, they seemingly got rid of all that and show you simply a list of libraries (configurable) – personally I consider this something to look forward to on my iPad
