There are a number of other threads – hereareafew – discussing the fact that the Plex model, which works great for pop music and most video, is not as well adapted to other forms of music, especially classical music.
As someone who’s spent a lot of time dealing with this in my personal collection, and has some experience dealing with classical music metadata on other sites, I wanted to propose a possible solution and get others’ reactions to it. Basically, my proposal is to create separate Plex media types for pop and classical music, just as there are separate media types for movies and TV shows. This may seem drastic, but it is actually the simplest solution for developers and users.
Right now, Plex recognizes that movies and TV shows are different types of file that need different types of metadata. This is reflected in the file hierarchy, the filename, and the interface.
If Plex didn’t support TV content with its own content type and interface, we’d have to kluge something together, by including season and episode data in some other field–just like we do right now for classical music. Plex solved this problem simply and elegantly by separating the two types of video content; Plex can do the same for music.
Here is my proposal:
Create a separate content type for classical music; make this one of the choices when creating a new library. Leave the current Music content type exactly as it is now, for those users for whom it works well.
Allow user agents to recognize and fill in an additional metadata field: Composer. This field is already filled in by some databases and therefore may not even require new agents; if it isn’t already filled in, it can be filled in by the user, or you can leave it to the user community to create an agent to support it.
When presenting classical libraries to the user, have a client present it in a hierarchy of: Composer, then Album. Artist information, which is rarely a useful way to sort classical music, is skipped in favor of Composer.
For example: the top level directory might look like this:
Bach, J.S.
Beethoven, Ludvig van
Brahms, Johannes
The Bach directory might look like this:
Bach: Coffee Cantata, Amor Artis Chorale [album]
Bach: Mass in B Minor, Philharmonia Symphony Orchestra [album]
Bach: Well-Tempered Klavier, Glenn Gould
Bach: Well-Tempered Klavier, Keith Jarrett
This would only require supporting one additional metadata tag. It would not be perfect, but it would, sadly, immediately make Plex one of the best solutions on the market for serving classical music files.
Splitting out classical from pop would allow the developers to roll out and develop this new feature without causing any problems for those users who only care about pop music. But it would be a huge help to a large and passionate community of users who are currently out at sea.
Interesting, but I don’t like it. iTunes and Sonos do not fragment in this manner; and mimicking these is not the worst plex could do. Implementing the ‘composer’ tag would address many people’s rumbles. Plex and music still need some maturing together, I think.
I have nagged plex as regards classical music. Their replies are positive (see my posts to other ‘composer’ discussions), which encourages me to think we may just see music improvement.
Honestly, given how poor iTunes and Sonos support is, I think mimicking them is the problem, not the solution.
The Composer tag would help, but only if it was supported at the library level. For example, you could achieve a similar result by:
Supporting the composer tag, and
Allowing a user to select browse tags at a library level.
So, for instance, you could create a pop library and let Plex sort by the current default: artist, then album. Or you could create a classical library and tell Plex to sort by composer, then album.
You could do this with a single checkbox (“Browse by composer”), but a more flexible system would give users even more options. For instance, someone with a big collection of showtunes might want to sort by album first.
I personally think splitting is not the worst idea, especially since I too have rock contents on my server and in the list of composers in iTunes pieces by bands appear, which for me are unwanted since I browse rock by album or band.
I totally could live with that. Thank you for your idea.
An interesting idea, and I’d be happy to see it implemented.
A lot of the challenge with classical music seems to be how everyone wants to view it different ways, making it hard to fit into a traditional hierarchy e.g. composer, musical style, period, instrument etc. could all be valid top level classes depending on your preference. An approach that might work would be a user-defined logical hierarchy based on track metadata like Gmail does with labels. There would still need to be a different physical hierarchy as well as a default, but it would give us the best of both worlds. Just a thought.
Just wondered if there had been any progress on this front. I’m still only using Plex for pop music and video content right now because there doesn’t seem to be a decent solution.
I currently do have separate Music libraries, one for Classical and one for everything else. I’ve had to configure my ID3 tags improperly, however, in order to make it work.
If Plex would just add support for more of the tags specified in the ID3 specification, I don’t think a new Library type would be necessary. There are several threads in the Feature Voting forum that deal with this. Take a look at these (only Plex Pass owners will be able to see these, sorry):
I like the idea, but rather than a new Library type, maybe just a new option in the Advanced page of the Music Library settings. A dropdown list labeled “Default View,” with options of “Composer” and “Artist” perhaps. This would determine the default selection in the View dropdown:
Simple uncomplicated solution to separating popular and classical music.
Add two folders under music and rename them “Classical Music” and “Pop Music”, or whatever you wish to call them.
Pop music files into Pop - Classical music files into Classical. They don’t mix. They tag automatically.
@colindbrookes said:
Simple uncomplicated solution to separating popular and classical music.
Add two folders under music and rename them “Classical Music” and “Pop Music”, or whatever you wish to call them.
Pop music files into Pop - Classical music files into Classical. They don’t mix. They tag automatically.
I’ve done that all along, but Plex still doesn’t understand or support the Composer tags, or any of the other ID3 tags that would make organizing classical better.
And if by “They tag automatically” you mean that Gracenote or Last.FM provide good metadata for classical music, both services are so full of inaccurate info that I find them completely useless. Their popular music info is full of errors, and their classical info is even worse.
Unfortunately Classical music is far more complicated to organise than other music types. I have a separate library for classical and initially thought to categorise everything by composer, but many classical CDs contain music by various composers, so viewing only by composer would split up these CDs which may or indeed may not be acceptable to different users which was pointed out above, different users have different ways in which they want to sort classical music so no one method will suit everybody.
As for iTunes, well in truth it doesn’t do a bad job. What it is, is very flexible with full access to almost all the available tags. If you want to access by composer, you can. You could even sort by Work or Movement if you wanted, although iTunes doesn’t make it easy to manipulate those tags. If you have a way to do so though (alternative tagger or AppleScript) then iTunes can use them. My problem with iTunes is its complete lack of server ability, but its basic functioning as a music organiser is quite frankly unsurpassed. I find that most criticisms of it are based on ignorance of its capabilities.
Since all votes were lost in the forum changeover, I took the opportunity to create a feature request for comprehensive support for all the tags necessary to fully manage a music library. Please add your vote on that thread.
