Does anyone use plex for their music libraries? Seems to work for the very basics if your music library is very small but it is missing simple things like - duplicates in playlist, no way to sort playlists, ‘shuffle’ doesn’t really shuffle the entire playlist etc.
All of these types of things have been included in other music apps forever. Reading through posts here it looks like people have been asking for this kind of thing for years but still nothing. I suspect if they haven’t improved the music library setup to date they likely won’t.
What do you think? Maybe stick with something else for music?
I have over half a million tracks in my PLEX audio library. Over 32,000 albums. Works for me. Of course I don’t really do playlists that much and when I do, I try not to put duplicates in. I understand the idea of removing duplicates but if you have albums and not just a large bucket of songs, you will always have duplicates once you start including Greatest Hits albums or Live albums along with your studio albums. I’ve got about 40 versions of “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones. Most of those are due to them putting it on the 30 or so compilation CDs they have released over their lifespan. Are they “duplicates”? Not sure.
Wow! That is quite the library! My library is nowhere near that size and I do have them broken up into albums but I don’t necessarily like all songs on all albums and that’s why I use playlists. The duplicates that I’m referring to are in the playlists that I create. I try not to duplicate them but I do occasionally… I may have more than I know because I can’t search/sort or anything with the playlists. I’d have to basically go through all the songs in the playlist manually. It appears they are sorted by album so it doesn’t even put duplicates next to each other unless I accidentally add the same song from the same album. And why does it allow you to do that anyway?! Difficult to manage because your options are basically to delete a song or change it’s place in the list - all manually.
I’m sure it would be a simple thing for them to add the ability to sort by what you want if nothing else.
The next most annoying thing to me is that when I ‘shuffle’ a playlist it doesn’t really randomly play from the entire list. I haven’t figured out for sure how it is shuffling. I’ll have to play with that a bit to figure it out but how hard can it be to actually randomly play songs from a list? Youtube music has the same problem. If you have a youtube music list of say 1000 songs, it will shuffle the same 100 songs over and over until you add or remove a song and then it pick some different songs and always shuffle those. It just can’t be that hard to shuffle music lists - there a bunches of media players that do just fine.
Music in Plex is what it is… while they have give us some cool stuff like Sonic Analysis there are other foundational features lacking which are unlikely to be added.
My advice is to make of it what you can, and if it isn’t meeting your needs, look at alternatives. If change is coming at all, it certainly won’t be quick.
Thanks for the comments - I was hoping there was some sort of add-on to plex etc or even a way to manually manipulate the sort order of playlists but I guess not.
beckfield - I’ll take a closer look at your suggestion but it looks like that would only work with the entire library and only in the browser right? I will go through that in detail to make sure.
I suppose I’ll have to stick with my good ol’ WinAmp for now - hopefully someday Plex will add the basics to playlists.
I’m not sure what you mean by “only work with the entire library,” but, while you have to create the playlist using the web app, once the playlist is created, any device that has access to the playlist can play it, and it will randomize the tracks every time you access it.
I’m curious about how you were able to add the same track from the same album to a playlist more than once. When I try that, it doesn’t add the track to the playlist if it’s already there.
