Judging by votes I guess this is not as obviously a gaping a hole as it seems to me. I have over 10,000 tracks carefully organized with tags. Many of these tracks pre-date even the concept of an “album”. Genre filtering is worthless to me until it can be done at the track level and I would dearly love to select and shuffle by track genre. I am an IT developer and without understanding the underlying structure of the code I can’t speak with authority but it’s hard to believe this is much more than a relatively small mod to make.
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I wouldn’t put much stock in the vote tally on older requests. When they switched from the previous forum software to the current, all votes were lost, and a lot of folks haven’t re-voted.
Ask: Add track-based genre filtering throughout (including smart playlists custom filter dropdowns) and specifically add it as a quick option in the music main browsing view, first dropdown that says “All” by default.
Why does Plex player de-prioritize sorting/filtering by music genre? Can you please add these options in an update? Windows player updated example current as of 4-30-20:
- Music browsing first drop down offers all/mood/rating/source/custom filter… - why no genres?
- Music Library second browsing default dropdowns are artists/albums/tracks/folders - why is genre missing?
- Music library custom filter setup offers “album genre” and “artist genre” in the huge dropdown choices but that’s too general - no “track genre” option? (Artists like Gorillaz can have jazz/rock/rap tracks all on the same album so these existing options are not useful.)
PS- rhetorical question for the UI - who uses “mood” tag more often than track-based genre filtering?
Edit- the album based view drop-down offers Genre, but for Gorillaz-based reasons above this is not useful.
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Yes. Please. For the love of God, add “track genre” capabilities throughout Plex Music. abirds736 captured the request perfectly above.
I really want to use Plex Music for my music collection, but it is still missing some basic key features.
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Thanks, don’t let this topic die! Lifetime user here and I use it for everything except for music 100% due to this.
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Lifetime Plex Pass holder here as well. I use Plex for Movies, TV, and Live TV/DVR, but there are a couple of features that are preventing me from moving to Plex for music as well (which is really unfortunate because I like where Plexamp is going - not perfect but a good start).
More/better track genre capabilities, playlist aggregation (Playlist Presence Filtering Criteria), and better local tag support (ID3 Tag support for ROBUST music library organization) are the three features that I really need to see.
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Same goes for track year, real life albums can of course contain tracks from many different years, but Plex only stores one year for all. Both of these limitations are legacy problems - at some point the decision was clearly made to store some metadata like genre and year only at the album level, and changing it now means changing the API, and a lot of code in a dozen client apps.
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Completely agree. The album-based approach rather than track-based approach was a big mistake. It severely limits or prohibits users’ ability to perform what I would consider to be basic music management functions.
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Agreed. There needs to be track based genres. With over 156 Various Artist albums, to be able to play all “Rock” tracks would mean those various artist ones get included too. I love Plexamp, music heading in the right direction, just a few things like this on the server side to sort and then we are perfect.
Things like:
- Listing tracks included on Various Artist albums when identifying an artists popular tracks.
- Reading the artist tag (not just album artist) and creating bios etc.
We are nearly there, so close I can smell it.
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Thanks for the reply. Commenting again because I use this daily and still need this! Plex team please
+1 I’ve spent years tagging my large music collection with a few custom tags related to moods I like. PLEX does not let me use my tags to play music from my custom genre. Really disappointing
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r111 I agree, thanks for commenting.
PLEX TEAM- please add ID3 tag direct editing and support from the files too! Including star ratings.
Still use this daily, still need this feature to be even close to capability of other solutions…
Agreed! It is frustrating that tracks’ genre tags are not more usable.
I’m not sure it’s such a desirable step to add direct id3 tag editing in Plex. It doesn’t do that with video either, and writing a full tag editor is loads of extra work for the Plex devs. Not to mention the security implications of giving Plex write rights to your media…
Personally I’m fine with editing tags in other software (Picard, beets, iTunes/Music, Yate, foobar, mp3tag, etc) that’s specifically built for that. Plex reading tags them and using them, that’s already a huge step forward.
Hey, chiming in, Plex reads tags but assigns the whole album a genre based on one of the tracks, which makes genre browsing useless. Since Music has sync capability, this would be the missing link to make plex an all-in-one media experience.
I stream music maybe 4 hours per day, and use plex for video maybe 2 hours per day. If we could get to track-based tag editing and tag writing, including star rating (not only in a central database), that would be perfect for smart playlists.
Plex devs: Please get us to tag-editing in-file and smart playlists that can do track-based "Rock AND 4+ stars" or "Rap & Hip-Hop AND 4+ stars", then be able to sync that playlist
If we can get to that ^^^ then that’s perfect and is an all-in one. Right now it’s really only usable as an album player.
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I’m with Certuna on this. Adding tag editing capability is a huge effort, and completely unnecessary when there are so many apps out there that are brilliant at it. Plex has always focused their efforts on delivery of media rather than editing, and I think they should not abandon that focus. Adding such a big piece to the project would only slow down the work of reading and using the tags that we need them to incorporate.
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++This
To sing along with the choir, whomever made the conscious decision to aggregate genres at the album level was seriously misguided - every major media player with a library has supported track-level metadata - going back to the 1990s with Winamp - and this one omission is the major hangup I have with using Plex.
I also don’t have any need to have ID3/metadata editing within Plex, but having spent innumerable hours managing my track-level metadata with other tools only to watch Plex virtually ignore it is frustrating.
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In the meantime, for those finding this thread and frustrated, these are the best players I have used for tag embedded library management (which should be the industry default) which work fast and handle ratings, track based genre, and dynamic playlists:
- Windows - MusicBee
- Linux (including Ubuntu/Pop version 20+) - Guayadeque
Side note: it’s crazy how bad all of the music players in Linux are
I have got to agree with Certuna on this.
There needs to be limits what Plex can do with your media. It needs to be able to only read all track specific tags like genres, Music tagging can be tricky when you have many different versions of albums. and many people who have spent countless hours properly tagging their collections with all the information under the sun are not going to be pleased if plex overwrites certain aspects of data which is often is not as cumbersome as other tagging soft like Picard Etc. I would blow as gasket and im sure many other people would too. The onerous of editing tags needs to be separate and placed on the owner of the media, the user.
Plex just seriously needs to add the ability to read and create track specific Genres within their software suite / library table (separate from your own data), This would really help elevate Plex status as a personal media streaming service and be the best that it has the potential to be.
As many others have said, not including track specific genres is really holding its Music streaming service back at the moment
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I have just started using Plex to play my large music collection on amazon alexa units.
Previously I used Kodi but it is difficult to use with Alexa.
I find it bizzare that the genre of a track is not stored in the database. I have lots of albums where there might be individual tracks which are different genres. It makes smart playlists very difficult to use correctly. For example an artists best of collection may have one track that is a christmas song so I have tagged this with the genre Xmas so that I can filter it out normally until Christmas time when my smart playlist would be set up to only play the Xmas genre.
Only sort of fix i can see is to change artist name from Artist to something like Xmas - Artist on the particular tracks affected so i can at least filter on Aritst Title does not contain Xmas
hardly ideal and Im not sure if even that will work properly
