I have a large collection of wav and aiff music files. These are all single tracks used mostly for DJing. Since they are all underground singles, the traditional management of sorting by artist or album are not optimal. Instead I use an old school folder structure to organize my music files. In the main Plex app I can choose to view all tracks, which works great for my singles collection, and then I can choose to sort them by folder which is perfect. Wondering if this is possible in Plexamp or if it could be considered for a future addition?
Interesting. How would one describe current focus of PlexAmp? Present an audio in nice and efficient way but ignore all audio that is not sortable in an easy way? Or is it to have all audio in the same place with an ease of navigation?
I currently have to switch to Plex app for unsorted audio - for all meditations that I have. As switching between apps does not work in a long run I always end up deleting PlexAmp for absence of folder navigation.
In what world do folders equal “ease of navigation” in a “nice and efficient way” for “complex situations”?
It’s true… there is a few use cases where users absolutely depend on some kind of folder structure. So I won’t argue to get rid of them immediately (which I occasionally consider a preferable solution).
As for your setup…
It’ll start with not mixing your meditation stuff with other music. I remember having this as an endless discussion with my Mum when she started adding a mix of meditation and related audio books to her iTunes. She insisted on not tagging them and afterwards wondered why everything got thrown together (“I just want to listen to my music at the moment – why doesn’t iTunes get that?”).
Example:
dedicated music library for meditation stuff
if the media isn’t super organized – use the Personal Media agent
Plex offers the means to structure your audio (e.g. Genre, Collections…) – apply those
Use the metadata you applied to find “the mix” you want for a certain situation
That’s way more flexible than going let’s say by 1 folder structure by meditation type and 1 folder structure by meditation origin (or duration, or guided vs. unguided, spiritual vs. non-spiritual…)
Sorry… got carried away.
TL;DR: there’s ways to handle it. admittedly folders might seem an easy solution in the short term – mostly because you can just dump stuff in a certain way and be done. Then however you’ll be missing out a lot of features that actually make things easier.
It’ll take a moment to think about how to structure things in the right way (for you). But it’s usually worth it.
If the outcome of this decision process is to stick with folders that’s ok as well… in that case you’ll end up switching apps (we do it all the time, not a big deal).
All of my audio files are tagged - that being said, they are also in a folder directory structure that is easy to sort through. There are only a few levels of sub-folders, but there are a LOT of them. “Sorting by genre” gives too big of a list for example and is quite useless.
PlexAmp is great if you know exactly what you are looking for in a few hundred files - but that’s not “navigation”, that’s “finding” a certain and specific thing.
The ability to drill down through a folder structure is a lot more efficient when you have a lot of files like the original poster. If you only have a hundred - well it gets pretty simple. If this guy has 30,000 then things get a little more difficult and complex.
I wholeheartedly agree that it would be great if there was a folder view. Heck, there IS one within PLEX itself that have been using it is there. That view is there for a solid reason too - it works. And for some of us, it simply works best.
I’d love to have the same PLEX folder view available in PlexAmp as well. It would make PlexAmp a great deal more usable. The alternative? Creating 50 different libraries? Yeah, that just doesn’t fly well within PLEX.
I too would favor a folder view. My logical mind seems to keep track of all my music in a directory type fashion. I am enjoying Plexamp and it is slowly taking first of place in my music listening.
Thanks all
I need plexamp for gapless playback and folder view/browser because I have large collection of classical music & meta-tags deficient (ie, no composer). Purchased 1-mon pass to test plexamp. Gapless playback in plexamp sees to be mostly working, more or less, but without folder view it’s practically useless except for recently played music or previously constructed playlists. I’ll give up after a month without folder browsing.
This would be super nice. Currently I’m really satisfied with Plexamp compared to Synology Audio station, the only thing that is missing in Plexamp right now is browsing by folder structure. I have a lot of music that’s not officially released / mixes which makes it hard to browse in the current views.
I’m able to create a playlist from within PlexAmp and I can create them in Plex Media Server. However, I have a ton of playlists in PMS that don’t (Or at least I can’t figure out how to) transfer or make usable within Plexamp. As far as folders are concerned, I have a lot of files that don’t have any encoded information within the MP3’s themselves… Folder view would be nice.
well I for example have several versions of the same recordings, so for example, dark side of the moon, I have the reguar cd, the sacd 2ch, sacd 5.1ch, MSFL mastering etc… plexamp smashes them all together and I just get “disk 1” and a bunch of “unknown disk”, no idea what’s what
it’s so nice to see the plex staff show their disdain for their users publicly
I’ve encountered the opposite where plex separates them into different versions when i don’t want them as such, not often but it’s all determined how I tag them.
i have encountered this though, e.g. normal album and instrumental album… so here’s how i fixed it:
Go to plex web to the offending album. click the three dots on the first track and select INFO, this will tell you EXACTLY which album folder it is. Close the info, edit the track and rename the album title (for me it was [album] instrumental). Do this for each track and they should separate into their own album.
This. Exactly. I am on Plex (Pass) with movies and series. For music I am on Subsonic, for it’s great folder use and I can stream my music everywhere. But two big downsides: no casting option, so I have to use another app like Dsub everytime. But this one crashes a lot. That said, subsonic isn’t developed anymore and the interface isn’t perfectly nice of fine. It’s ugly and not intuitive. I like the interface from Spotify, which looks a lot like Plex amp. But it simply isn’t working if you have, let’s say, over 1,000 tracks. I also have a big (200.000+) database with a lot of compilation albums, so it’s not working with plex…
