Music: Important change request for Box-Sets and Classical Music

Feature Suggestions
1

I am a huge PLEX fan, but when it comes to music (library presentation) it has to improve.
It does work for popular music (with limitations as well), but It is just not good enough for Classical Music and it gets unusable when it comes to Box-Sets (i.e. Karajan Complete Recordings with 200+ CD’s).
To stick to the standard views like artists and/or albums with the available sort options just wont do it here anymore.

I totally hope on Plex to evolve here fast and innovative, so I have a suggestion here:

I know that the problem starts with the available tags already, since the standard id3 tags do not solve the issue in the first place.
How ever, MusicBrainz suggest a tagging scheme for classical music, and we should go from there.

  1. Clustering/Grouping
    The most important feature (useful for Movies as well) is to introduce an additional layer that enables a group of discs in the top view.
    We could rely on the “GROUPING” tag that iTunes recently introduces (or the MovieSet fro Movies), but we could as well just have it manually maintained through the GUI (I select a couple of CD’s and “group” them - which should have the same effect than putting them in a folder in the CD view.)

  2. Movements, Artists, Album Artists, Composer
    Just “add” the feature, that PLEX reads out these additional Tags (Movements introduced by iTunes as well - MOVEMENT, MOVEMENTNAME, MOVEMENTTOTAL), than we can use these Tags in custom views (next feature)

  3. Custom Views
    Please “Add” some possibilities to have “custom views” with a music libarary, where one can select a view criteria on what is to include or exclude from the view, and than select data/tags to be used to “group” the view (possibly based on the additional Tags from (2.)

  4. Each “Group/Folder” should have its own “Custom View”
    Now this is important:
    It should be possible to maintain “Custom Views” for each Group/Folder, since this all is not about maintaining the standard beahviour but special cases like Box-Sets, etc.

Having all this would give us flexibility enough to handle more complex library scenarios
and would add a great boost to user-friendliness of large music libraries (like mine).

Thank you for your consideration.

2

If the Collections feature in Plex ever gets implemented as several feature requests suggest, I think #1 would be taken care of.

The Movements idea of #2 actually is provided for in the ID3 specification. Plex just needs to implement support for all 3 Title tags, and this would be done.

I’m not clear on what you described in #3 and #4, but it seems like the Collections feature I mentioned in response to #1 might apply.

3

There has been sporadic but consistent concerns raised since at least 2010 regarding PLEX’s music (especially classical!) and ID3 tag limitations and while I remain hopeful for some resolution my optimism has dimmed. While many of the challenges I noted back in 2013 have been addressed and some really great features I had never considered have been added other issues stubbornly remain. Consider Van Cliburn: World’s Favorite Piano Music. Each track should be tagged at the composer, composition and movement level. I can do this in Yate and Media Monkey so I don’t need PLEX to do anything more than allow me to view, sort and filter by these tags. For a really unusual album consider Hush by Yo Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin. Each track has 2 artists and a composer.

Basically, I see no reason for PLEX to reinvent the wheel. I can do all my ID3 editing in 3rd party software but need PLEX to:

  1. Realize that a file has been modified. It was previously fairly good at this but more recently I find I need to remove the album from PLEX, edit it on my computer (rather than on the server), and reload the file. Rescanning library files is no longer adequate for PLEX to detect ID3 changes.
  2. Map PLEX ID3 fields to Yate/MM ID3 fields. Allowing me to edit displayed field name would be nice.
  3. Display the ID3 fields during playback (with scrolling if necessary).

Also, I can download a track but I can’t download an album. Is this an oversight or a copyright issue?