I use Plex for audiobooks.
As such, I would like to have inline Collections for audio libraries like were recently developed for Movies and TV Shows.
That way, when I select Album View at the top level it would display one poster for a series (when applicable) instead of each book in a series, while also displaying one-offs. This would have the advantage over Artist View by allowing for series to be listed separately—in the case of an author who has multiple series, or both one-offs and series; or in the case of different authors contributing to a common series.
This would be great, but first we need a dedicated ‘Audio Book’ library type with auto-resume and the relevant metadata etc. (title, author, narrator etc.). It doesn’t really work using the ‘Music’ library.
That being said, it would be great to be able to access the ‘Star Wars’ soundtracks in the “Star Wars” collection that also has the movies and TV shows.
In my full list of albums, Harry Potter takes up one slot. The Wheel of Time takes up one slot. The Enderverse takes up one slot. As does Star Wars, Star Trek, Narnia, Expeditionary Force, Chaos Seeds, King’s Dark Tidings, and a host of other series/franchises.
There really needs to be an ability to have inline collections for audio libraries in Plex.
Of course I could browse by Album Artist. But browsing by Album Artist means that every book would essentially be buried in an artist collection, when doing so is not necessary for a one-off or for an author from whom I only have a single book.
In addition, there are franchises and series which are written by multiple authors. I would also not consider changing the Album Artist to some arbitrary series label because it would muck up its organization with other books that have no series. And, doing so would require online metadata scraping do be done manually, since the album artist may no longer match the author.
Just adding on to this that not only would I also love audio book support but as a lot of mine are actually lectures (coursework) rather than books - it would be really helpful if there was a quick tool that you could use to add a “book” where you select a folder and give basic name/title type metadata - so if I had a recording of a lecture I could add it as another item and just put the speakers name and the title of the talk in manually.
This will also greatly simplify the entire question of foreign language media or localization - which is a problem massively larger with the audiobook/spoken word genre than really any other type of media that plex deals with.
Just checking in as part of my “early 2021 clean-up”… is this suggestion asking for the same as the one linked below? – in that case I’d like to consider merging both threads (probably into this one as it has 20 more votes)
If this is ever implemented, please consider the following as a suggestion to include in this functionality.
In music libraries we can currently tag both artists and albums as being part of a collection (but they are not mixed - there are collections for artists and collections for albums). However, to see a collection of albums or artists you must first change to display the library by artist or album, and then narrow the display by selecting the specific collection you want to see. Since I have collections of both artists and albums in my classical music library, I’d love to be able to see all the collections on one page, rather than having to switch back and forth among the various display options and drop down menus only to be limited to seeing the contents of one collection.
I would suggest a Collections page, just like in a movie library, that is selectable at the top of the library (Recommended - Library - Collections - Playlists). On that page show all music collections, displaying the name of the collection, and then underneath identifying it as “Artist Collection” or “Album Collection”. This would mimic the collections page in a movie library, but put “Artist” or “Album” where number of movies is displayed in a movie collection. One would then be able to see all the collections that have been created for that music library in one place, and drill down into a collection to select a specific piece of music.
I would also like something like what NeuroDawg outlines - collections of albums, a la the movie collections. I’d love to be able to tag albums in multiple collections for a variety of reasons, whether that a particular musician is involved, or the albums being my favourite, or my own idiosyncratic genre favourites, etc. Some of what I want to do can be done with playlists, but with a relatively small number of albums listed those playlists can definitely get unwieldy, and I want to listen to albums as albums, not as part of a playlist.
You can already create collections of albums… same goes for individual tracks or artists.
The focus of this feature suggestion is to show the resulting collections not only in the Collections tab but also inline when displaying the library accordingly (e.g.
displaying the library by Artists → show the artist collections inline along your artists
displaying the library by Albums → show the album collections inline along your albums
display the library by Tracks → show the track collections inline along your tracks).
Exactly the same request as NeuroDawg please.
For example I have over a hundred albums by the group Hawkwind. I would like to just see one ‘Hawkwind’ icon when browsing my albums, with the ability to click on it to see all the Hawkwind albums are available.
Have you tried displaying your library by artists? It seems this will perfectly cover the usecase you’re describing (not to diminish the suggestion in general…)
its been years and years and no news?