After tons of tinkering, I think I’ve finally come up with a decent workaround for cataloging my classical music collection.
First off, I have this set up as its own library separate from my rock/jazz/blues library. I also completely disregard the albums certain tracks were included on and, instead, use the work as an album title. This is also reflected in my file structure. So, one album under Ludwig van Beethoven would be “Piano Sonata 1 in F Minor, Op. 2 No. 1” and that album would have four tracks since it’s a four movement sonata. It’s important to remember to change the file names to reflect 01, 02, 03, 04 so they list correctly and also adjust the # on the meta tags so there’s no conflict of information.
The track names are simply the movements. For example, in Piano Sonata 1, the first track is “01 I Allegro”.
Once I’ve added the files into Plex, I change the year to the publication date of the piece and change the sort order to the Opus number. In this example, the sort title is “Op. 2 No. 01” that way I can sort each work by title and see exactly where certain pieces align with each other.
I also make a custom album cover that includes “Piano Sonata 1” and, when applicable, the popular shorthand name such as Moonlight or Pathetique. This makes it easy to find a specific piece when you’re just scrolling on a device.
Then I create a collection that collects all of Beethoven’s sonatas, a different one for his symphonies, etc. You can also set the artist to the performer for your own reference if that’s important to you.
It’s not perfect and, of course, some better native Plex classical library management would be ideal but until then, this seems to suit my needs. It’s a bit time consuming, too, but once it’s done I think it is a great way to handle this music. I’ve included a couple screenshots to help illustrate what I’m talking about.
This is the album page for the Moonlight sonata. As you can see, the movements are listed in order. I took the first section of the Wikipedia page about this piece for some additional info.
This is the view from the artist page. As you can see, it’s super easy to find the specific piece you’re after. These are sorted by “Title” which is actually the Opus number for each piece.
