Music artist page with infuriating horizontal scrolling for everything that's not an album

Plex Players Desktop Players
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I need to precede this with the statement that all of the below applies only to the desktop client since this is a solved problem in Plexamp where we have the option to show all the different release types as either a grid, list or carousel. But I digress.

The discrepancy in layout between albums and every other release type (singles, compilations, EPs, etc) is really frustrating. For most artists the amount of studio albums is generally far lower than for the other release types considering that one album usually has multiple singles, and record companies love milking consumers with hits compilation after hits compilation.

Using an eight-release wide layout (since that’s what I see), here’s examples for some of the artists I have in my library:

examples
examples822Ă—314 5.81 KB

I admit that these are not the norm for all the artists in my library, since there are a few artists that I have decent collections of as a serious collector, and for the majority it’s usually a single track or album or a few tracks or albums at most.

Saying that this affects the minority of artists in people’s libraries glosses over the fact the ones it does affect are usualy the ones they listen to the most - hence the large collection or releases for those artists in their libraries.

And, it’s not as though this discussion hasn’t been had multiple times before:

The problem is that no one from Plex seems to want to acknowledge this. Not acknowledging that the problem exists. Not acknowledging that what’s there is suboptimal. Not acknowledging that they even see this as a bug. Basically thinking that if they ignore it long enough the problem will just silently fade into the background, I’m assuming. I really hope that I’m wrong about that though.

When someone does respond (another user, not Plex), it’s usually that you can turn off the grouping setting. Yes, this solves the issue of not having to scroll horizontally for hours on end, but then all the different release types are just displayed together again. That’s just hiding the problem, not solving it. Band-aid, meet gashing arterial wound.

Which begs the question: Why is the desktop implementation as half-baked as it currently is?

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Thanks for taking the time to make this post - I particularly like your little diagrams, which neatly illustrate the problem!

I’m the author of the Feature Request you linked - I don’t know whether voting there brings any visibility to issues at all because I think that, fundamentally., Plex (as a company) has an issue with prescriptiveness and “Our-Wayism”.

The Plex project was started 15 years ago when Elan ported XBMC to Mac OS. It was a hobby project - Elan wanted the software to work in the way he wanted, to meet his needs. Music support had very specifically baked-in “features” and “limitations”, many of which we’re still living with today, the greatest of which is the concept that “The Album Is King”. (This can still be seen today in, for example, the way that Track Artist defers to Album Artist, and the complete lack of singleton support.)

But Plex now is a multi-million-dollar company with [number-pulled-out-of-ass] tens of thousands of users with different needs and requirements. And while Plex might have great abilities in the coding area, I think it’s widely accepted they’re pretty deficient in the UX space. IME, one of the overriding principles in UX is “Sane Defaults, User Choice”. Plex is poor in the former (we’re still defaulting new clients to 720p in 2022!) and utterly abysmal in the latter.

It’s fine that someone at Plex thinks this horizonal scrolling is acceptable, so long as they give those of us who disagree the option to change it to match the top-line albums. (And yes, like you say, people will come along as say “But you can just turn it off” but that’s a tacit admission that it doesn’t work - “Our choices are broken for you, so don’t use them.”)

And, of course, the decisions Plex have forced upon us with respect to the display of subcategories don’t stop at horizontal scrolling. The Quick Album Change drop-down (on the album screen) only shows top-level albums, even if you’re viewing a subcategorised album - why does it not (at least) show the entries in the subcategory you’re browsing?

Subcategorised albums also don’t show the release year below the album art - they show the album artist (which we already know because we’re viewing that artist) and more, that’s highlighted and the album title is lowlighted - the opposite way to the information given for top-level albums which makes eye-scanning them more confusing than it needs to be.

Plex is a front-end to our media collections, running on our servers - we shouldn’t be beholden to Plex’s or musicbrainz’s decisions, particularly in issues of organisation and display. It’s bad enough that I have to edit album information on a third-party website and wait a week for others to agree that that’s what should be displayed on my computers, but to have to do the same to change where it appears - that’s just ridiculous. Why can I not edit the Subcategory in the same place I can edit the Title, Artist, Release Date, etc.? (And again, to head off at the pass the people who’ll come along as say “You could Prefer Metadata…” - yes, but that comes with its own issues, including overall reduced functionality, and requires yet another third-party application to edit the Subcategory.)

Right now, all we’re asking for is a toggle on the artist screen which changes the view of that page from how it is now with horizontal scrolling to each section using the same display code as the top-level section and flowing the albums down the width of the screen. User Choice over “Our-Wayism”, please Plex!

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