I have a Library of Audio Description content which is just audio tracks for visually impaired people for both Movies and TV on my NAS. I am looking for a way to setup a Plex Movie Library and TV Show Library with these for displaying relevant information for titles and descriptions of the movies and shows. My goal is to be able to access the descriptive audio content from my iOS app to listen while I am watching movies with my wife on our TV. I also wish to be able to download content from my personal library for these audio files of movies and TV shows when traveling like I would be able to download videos to my device.
Is there a way to do this? It just seems to me like the scanning process would just need to enable adding MP3 and M4a files when creating a movie or TV show library.
Thank you
There is no way with Plex to play an external audio file in sync with a video file.
Using a separate plex app to listen to the audio description while the main movie plays on a different device is not possible at all.
The only way to add an additional audio stream is to mux the audio track into the main movie file. You can then select the audio description track instead of the “normal” audio either during or before playback.
You can use MKVtoolnixGUI to do that.
It is advisable to add a “stream title” to differentiate the audio tracks from each other:
I am not looking to have Plex sync the audio file with the video. If I am listening to an AD track at the same time we are watching a video I would play it separate and do it manually. I have tried DLNA for this but DLNA sucks.
I am just looking to create a movie library with audio file (mp3 and M4a) that uses the same cataloging as if the files were mkv or mp4 files.
It’s unfortunately not possible. “Movie”-type libraries only accept video files in Plex.
If you had a way to turn the audio file into a video file (e.g. with an all-black video track), you could add the audio description as a local Extra to the movie. https://support.plex.tv/articles/local-files-for-trailers-and-extras/
With the right compression settings, the all-black video track would require only very limited bandwidth.
That way you can browse to the very same item in your movie library and then select the extra with your desired audio track for playback – while the main movie plays on the big screen for the rest of your family.
It just seems to me like the scanning process would just need to enable adding MP3 and M4a files when creating a movie or TV show library.
I’m not sure I fully grok your requirements, but I’ll lay this out just in case.
I use audio-only libraries of type “show” (not “movie”, so far) as a custom way of deploying audio books.
- Use a library of type “show”
- Convert each episode to an mp4 container, aac audio track, NO video track.
- Use the plex standard show naming convention: TITLE - s99e99 - DESCRIPTION.mp4 and they show up normally as episodes
Play them and you get audio with a blank screen, and, autoplay works perfectly too.
Interesting! How do you produce the files? ffmpeg?
I reckon many software packages out there do protest when you fail to add a video stream.
Yes to all that. ffmpeg always works because it does exactly what you tell it to. But, if you’re using a converter that won’t let you go straight to mp4, go ahead and create an m4a then change the file extension to mp4.
I have not found a plex client that does not play these files well, including the all-too-often maligned web client, which I really like.
One more thing I like to do here is to sync the DESCRIPTION from the above filename pattern into the plex “episode description” field automatically with a simple plex API script. Makes the UI a better experience and a good match to the conventional plex look and feel.
But I assume if your audio stream isn’t already in AAC format, ffmpeg will perform a lossy conversion from e.g. mp3, right? I’m not sure if mp3 is an allowed audio codec inside mp4 
Yes to all. I use AAC because it’s mp4 friendly. If it doesn’t originate as AAC the resulting audio will be “compressed twice”. It’s less than optimal but still easily acceptable for me and my particular use case.
Thank you to both @ottokerner and @pandas for your thoughtful responses. Changing the files to MP4 is working so far. I am changing the file extensions to mp4 from mp3 and m4a and it is recognizing and playing the audio correctly as well as displaying the movie information.
Thank you
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