Many hours of experimentation over the last couple of months have landed me on what I believe to be the least lousy way to implement a music video library. There are a few caveats that I will get to later, but here is what I did.
Create a TV Show Library
The home video and movie libraries have one key flaw: there is no way to create separate Artist folders. This substantially reduces the ability to organize the library. The home video option is especially clunky, with greatly reduced opportunities to leverage artwork, theme music, descriptive text, etc. Using a TV Library eliminates all of these problems.
How to Build a Music Video Library: Part I - File Structure
- Follow all Plex guidelines for naming media. The Artist becomes the show. The Songs become Episodes. Do not create a Season 1 folder for reasons I will get to later. Just make sure video in the Artist folder is named Artist - S01Exx - Song.
- Find a nice vertical artist photo and save it to the Artist folder as poster.ext.
- Find a nice piece of backdrop art (preferably 1920x1080) and save it to the artist folder as fanart.ext.
- Music video thumbnail grabs are usually lousy. Find backdrop art from each video and save it to the Artist folder. Use the same name as the video, other than the file extension.
- Use a tool to edit an MP3 audio clip from one of the videos for Artist theme music. Save it as theme.mp3.
At this point, you should have one folder per artist that contains a poster picture, a fanart picture, your music videos, a backdrop picture for each video and a theme song.
How to Build a Music Video Library: Part II - Plex
- Add a TV Show library named Music Videos and point it to the appropriate folder.
- Make sure you select the Personal Media Shows agent. I also recommend Hide Seasons (even if it is only partially implemented).
- Once you create your library, you will need to edit each Artist “Show” to add metadata. I generally include an Artist Bio and some genre and collection tags.
- After you edit the Artist, you will need to edit each Video “Episode” to give it a name.
What You Get (and What You Don’t)
Appearance - The resulting library will look great in pretty much every Plex app. It is especially nice if you are using something like OpenPHT that provides a lot of interface customization. I have yet to find a user-interface scenario this approach does not look great in.
Functionality - There are a couple of pieces of weirdness that come with this approach
- There is no way to avoid having to click through a Season 1 folder in most Plex clients at this time.
- Every video will be listed as an Episode with an Episode Number immediately below the title. There is no way to turn this off.
- TV Episodes can be sorted by Episode Number or Date. They cannot be sorted Alphabetically. This means you are pretty much stuck with whatever order you labeled them with when you set up your directory structure.
How it Works with the Music Library
One of the reasons I said not to create a Season 1 folder is that this approach still has videos listed directly under an Artist folder. That means that these videos will appear in the Music Library. The catch is that there is no way to edit the name of a video in the Music Library and these are all named with the S01Exx prefix required to make them work in the TV Library. There is currently no way to fix this short of creating a second copy of the entire video library with a different naming scheme.
