I’m a bit old school I guess - I like to look at liner notes when I listen to music. But now that most of my music has been digitized and the original CD’s tucked away in a closet - getting to the liner notes isn’t feasible. So I have spent 100’s of hours scanning the front cover, the CD, the back cover, and most importantly - the booklet and loaded it into the MusicBrainz cover art database. And many others have also contributed such material to MusicBrainz. But I have found no product that provides the means to examine those scanned images conveniently within the app.
This feature request is to add an ability to add an additional extra type specifically to music albums for booklets. Either in image form (with a sequence number - like it is in MusicBrainz), or as a PDF, or as a last resort a link to the MusicBrainz cover art page where the images can be viewed in a web browser.
Examples of the kinds of images that are available, these are some of my contributions to the site:
I have made a few pure digital purchases that provided a PDF of the booklet as part of the package. Hyperion records, for example, provides that kind of material. I would like to be able to add that booklet PDF as an extra for the album; so I can read it while listening to the music.
Hi, I’m currently do this as I’m ripping my entire CD collection. I’m a big fan of brass band contests and have a lot of albums, it’s nice to read the liner notes about that years competition as I’m listening. How did you go about creating the PDFs ?? I’d like to get the best method before I start the many discs I’ve got to do.
I had opened another ticket for this, but a Ninja pointed me here. Here’s what I had posted:
Many of the music albums on my library – especially classical album – have multi-page booklets of liner notes. Some are supplied as PDF and some as JPG. Is it possible to display links to these on the Web client page for the album (and maybe in other clients), akin to how trailers, interviews, and other extras work for video? I think all that would be needed would be a thumbnail and a link, with the browser doing the work of displaying the files when opened. I figure that the files would need to be in the same folder as the audio files, or perhaps in a specifically named sub-folder.
I haven’t created PDF’s; but I could. What I have done is to capture images of all the paper materials using a flatbed scanner. That’s because I was uploading them to MusicBrainz and images is the format they support. You can view examples of such scans in my original post where I provide links. The PDFs I have are made by the providers of digital music. Mostly (entirely?) from Hyperion. If I wanted to create a PDF of the booklet, it’s an easy matter to create a PDF for them; and there are multiple products that can do that - free and otherwise. I happen to have an Adobe Acrobat DC license so I use that when creating a PDF.
As a recent arrival here I was surprised to find that this isn’t a feature baked into Plex by default.
If the devs are reading this I’d be happy in the short term if Plex could capture the back cover art and liner notes, even if it takes a bit longer to work out how to display them (in both Plex and Plexamp, pretty please…)
Hi everyone, another user that would like this feature implemented. I have scanned the bookletss of many of my albums and it would be amazing to be able to visualize them while listening to the actual disc, making the experience as closer as interacting with the physical media.
Hopefully this is something many people are interested so it could be worked by the dev team
I would love to see this. I get that not all platforms (like TVOS) could support having PDFs and such, but (speaking as a software and web developer) I don’t see why this would be a difficult feature to handle.
Another user who is missing the complete album artwork for albums (within Plex or PlexAmp).
I have my albums all correctly tagged with front, back and inside artwork through mp3tag. Unfortunately only the front cover is showed while playing music. I was thinking about the following. When you play a song\album through your plexamp player, you could tap on the image and change from front to back to inlay etc (instead of the visualization meters). It could then show all album work while playing.
There is no other music player who can do this so it would be a big plus, but i was wondering if it is that hard to implement (if your music is correctly tagged) because it can already show the front image?
As this is a request which is going on for some years now, maybe a developer can show a light on the possibilities?
Very useful stuff, it would be so nice to have it on Plex as I also have all my records scanned, and it should be easier to see what I have while listening.
It would be cool if you could have Plex display the “booklet” that comes with a CD. If booklet pages could be put into a folder called “booklet” or something like that, I would be cool if Plex could let me flip through the “booklet” page by page while I am listening to an album.
I want this feature too. I’ve seen that it is possible with other streaming like Roon but I don’t see a simple feature like this is worth paying a subscription or paying for a licence of Roon. I mean it’s just a simple process of adding an internal PDF reader.
I’m working on a project at the moment compiling 20+ years of concert recordings for a Wind Orchestra. Each of these concerts has concert programmes containing loads of information, which I have in digital form of PDFs. What I want to do is have the music play from the concerts and have the ability to swipe left and right on the album artwork to read the program. I contacted Plex and got a reply from one of their staff pointing me to the feature request so I’m voting for this one although pretty much all of the requests for features are several years old so I guess I won’t see any action. But from what I’ve seen there are several people that want this feature. I could write my own program but add this feature to Plexamp would solve this completely for me.
I for one absolutely DO NOT want scanned images or pdfs. Wanting to view the whole CD/LP booklet is a different thing to Liner Notes. This is also unfeasible to use on a phone as some album artwork uses hand written or hard to read fonts in ‘creative’ layouts that are difficult to read when small.
Liner notes in most cases exist as data already, at least on Discogs. Data can be displayed as text on any device properly, legibly and simply.
