I’d like Plex (both desktop and mobile clients) to use the embedded art of my songs the same way Spotify does. Each song has it’s own artwork of some sort, so it would be nice to see that instead of the current behaviour, which is showing the album cover for all tracks.
At the moment, when you play music it shows the artwork from the album, however I have several compiled albums, rather like playlists, where the artwork for each track is different. I would like to have a setting to allow showing artwork from the track OR the album. For most albums, the artwork is embedded in each track anyway, so even changing the functionality to per track would work anyway.
I know this feature request hasn’t gotten a lot of traction, but I’d like to echo it. Several of my albums have unique art for each song and I’d really like to see them. Not to mention, this would be helpful for songs that have been auto-grouped under [Unknown Album] due to not having a ‘proper’ album.
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This is one of the limitations that originates from how the internal database was designed for music. Albums in Plex are their own tables, so things like Year, Artwork and Genre are set up to be album-level attributes.
How this should be designed is that Albums are not in static db tables but dynamic groupings, and metadata only gets stores on a track level. Artist, Album Artist, Composer, etc should all be stored in one “artist entities” table and referenced from their appropriate field.
Anyway, to make a long story short: track-level artwork would need a major overhaul of the internal db structure so don’t expect it anytime soon. Unfortunately.
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Aw, that’s unfortunate. Still, thank you for the very informative reply!
I too would love to add artwork to individual songs, like in iTunes.
I have a lot of compilation albums and would like to see the artwork
for the ‘Singles’ as released.
This is one of those missing features I would pay for rather then for the other premium functionality I don’t need.
While I can understand the argument this feature would not totally match the idea of an album (because it has just 1 album cover), let me give you just 2 ideas of why this isn’t the best way of thinking:
- One cover per album is really 90s thinking. Today albums are provided digitally. And songs are digital units. Usually they share the same cover. But why should that be in the future? Maybe there are even albums already released that have different covers per song already. Technically, it’s possible for years or even decades. And people use it, especially for compilations for such a long time and a lot of players support it, too. Just think about an album cover that would contain the song name.
- This functionality is so small compared to all the other functionality provided by Plex. Sometimes such simple solutions would allow much more uses cases (given that one softens its own borders). For example I have top 100 albums for each year. The album artist is “top 100” and the album name is the respective year. This allows me to store top 100 songs in the same folder. It allows me to see my top 100 songs next to the other artists in one and the same web page. It allows me to have a hierachy of the individual years because in the “artist” page I see all the individual years. All this isn’t possible with playlists.
tbh the patronizing way of Plex enforcing all those rigid structures of how files, songs, albums should be organized discourages me to use Plex fully and pay for it. I fear to spent so much time to make my data plex friendly. And I fear to loose all the time I spent in my library and information I put in there if Plex wouldn’t be there for ever (Plex pricing model doesn’t seem to be sustainable). And while making it all Plex friendly it becomes unfriendly to the majority of other players, too.
To bring it on the point: this feature would provide useful functionality for so many people while not disturbing anyone else library. You could still have one and the same cover for an entire album. Period.
I also would like to see this feature added to plex. I download the soulection radio broadcast, where the DJ has each session with the number and date of broadcast in the artwork. I put these in an album based by year, it would be great if plex displayed this so I see the embedded artwork instead of the first one that it grabbed when I added the files.
Seconding this. Have channels/podcasts with each episode having an individual thumbnail.
trying to keep this alive…
Seconding this too
If there is no cover artwork file in the album’s folder, does it not resort to using artwork embedded in each track?
I’m sure I was told that it displays external artwork files in preference to embedded but will use embedded if nothing else is available.
That is of course assuming ‘Local Media Assets’ is at the top, otherwise it’ll just grab images from the 'Net.
Itunes has this for more than 10 years now. There are multiple reasons for this:
- kids who don’t know how to read can recognize their songs by cover art. my 4yo uses an iPod nano for that, and I would like to upgrade him to an Android phone with Plex Amp
- I group radio shows/podcasts/livesets per year (one year = one album), each show has it’s own thumbnail
- Top 100 albums
The DB structure doesn’t have to change, it can be implemented when they display the song: if the song has embedded art → use the song’s art, else use the album’s art. They already fetch song metadata for the currently playing song. They might need a new column for the songs to store the embedded art (I haven’t check how their tables are structured).
I would also like this feature. Plex clearly picks up the artwork embedded in the file; when I imported my whole Music.app library, it broke up compilations (discussed elsethread) by artist, and it showed the individual artwork.
I would like to get away from Music.app, and even bought a lifetime Plex Pass in anticipation of that, but this feature is honestly souring me on moving my music library away from it. Having individual track art is very personally important to me, and I’m surprised that it isn’t supported.
I have a good number of custom edit compilations I’ve done for years and made my own “albums” from them. I don’t need Plex to store the cover art into it’s library. All I care is that when it streams a track that there’s a way for it to read the art that’s embedded in the file as it loads it to play/stream and prefers that on a track-by-track basis. It can still just store a single cover art for the album in its library meta, as I usually have a custom cover art for the album itself. Even on some standard albums, I like to use individual single cover art on some individual tracks. This doesn’t have to involve the scraper or meta stuff at all, just have it prefer file cover art during the playback process.
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I completely agree with this request and would like to add my support. It’s a basic yet crucial feature to display the embedded artwork for each track instead of defaulting to the album cover for all songs.
As someone who values the effort put into curating unique artwork for individual tracks, it’s frustrating that this isn’t reflected in Plex. Spotify and other platforms already provide this functionality, and it significantly enhances the listening experience.
Coming from my lossless iPod collection, support for custom album art for individual songs in an album and and/or generally better support for singles would be much appreciated!
Coming from playing on the lame media system in my 2013 POS Toyota Prius C, which shows artwork from individual tracks, really guys who designed this feature? Have they ever listened to music?
I’ve been grouping singles in bulk folders together with individual track art since the 90’s.
All players I’ve used could show that art for decades–but would default to art found in the folder if the track didn’t have it’s own (which is good, cause it means albums didn’t need to store that same image 12 times).
I 32nd this request!
Here’s the head-scratching part for me: when I look at the tracks in MP3Tag, I can see that each track has it’s own unique artwork. Must be a way to access that without a complete DB rewrite.
I hope you enjoyed my TED Talk.
