I have been trying for a few days to add my old radio shows to Plex. The difficulty is they are not formatted as “music”, there are no “albums” (people still use albums?), “tracks”, or even “artist”, etc.
What I need is to format mp3s as tv shows. I could use the year of broadcast as “season”, with individual episodes thereafter. So far, I can only get a mangled mess of things, with Plex shoehorning in everything under “various artists” and the like.
True, they are not video, but they are also not always music. Podcasts, audio books, radio serial shows, etc. there are many reasons for things to only be audio.
Thank you for the suggestion, that is what I am considering doing, but that also means changing tens of thousands of mp3 metadata tags, when all that is really needed is to be able to tell plex just to use the file/folder structure for organization, instead of metadata.
There are ways to generate the metatags from the folder structure.
If your files are already in a comparable folder structure, where there are “Album Artists” and “Albums”, then you can use this.
Here I explained the feature for a minor operation, but you can involve not only the file name but also the names of the folders wherein this file is stored:
I gave it a shot with one small show, and it seems like this might work. It will still take a considerable amount of time for the number of shows I am talking about, but still a tiny fraction of the time it would take changing the tags by hand.
I truly wish they would implement an opt-in option to ignore metadata and simply organize in the Plex database itself via file structure. That would have meant no work at all, and I realize we can present it that way via choosing folder view on the UI, but one has to rely on the end-user to do that, and they still see all the confusing “various artists” stuff.
Anyway, thanks so much for the help, it will take a few days to get it straight but this will get it done for me. Much appreciated.
