I’m certain this has been suggested before (found some old requests marked as closed), but I’m going to request it again:
Feature Request: I wish I could have more than one category for audio-only media libraries.
Justification: Personally, I wish I could choose to do things like separate them by Genre (at a minimum) so that an automatic playlist of “everything” could be Genre-specific instead of including all of my Gregorian Chants, Rock’n’Roll, Country, Christmas, Audio Books, Old Radio Shows, Sounds of Nature and more. Sorry, but such a playlist is just plain STUPID in every possible scenario, but I haven’t found a way to get rid of it or to create my own “master” (i.e. Library-spanning) “automatic” (I.e. I don’t manually add every single track or album) playlists for the various genres.
Then there is the issue of audio media that has seasons and episodes (instead of track/title) as well (like radio shows, podcasts, and probably more) that require special attention by the “librarian” that is cataloging them.
Perhaps there’s a way to generalize library definition for Advanced users by specifying how the media file names are to be parsed into the necessary pieces for the various library types?
Hopefully, others that are dreaming of this will chime in with better descriptions that I’m able to provide and/or tell me where the best place is to comment and vote on an already OPEN version of this same suggestion (since I didn’t find it by searching here.)
I will need to look into smart collections to find out. My only experience with something I thought was called smart collections was when collections were created automatically – but that really didn’t work right when I experienced it, so I think I figured out how to disable it.
Hmmm… This might work but I find it humorous that the ‘genre’ selection I was looking for is actually missing! Yes, there are options for “Artist genre” and “Album genre” but nothing for “Track genre”! For the thousands of MP3 files I’ve tagged, I’ve never noticed a genre setting for Artist or Album … just for each individual track that I’ve tagged. But, if the track genre was a selection option, it would probably work – especially since I see that there are now Smart Playlists with the same selection options (though I don’t know if either of those can span libraries – though a smart collection should, I suppose.) Thanks for the idea.
@OttoKerner OK, I must look for the Audio Books library request and move my vote over there, then. FWIW, since books don’t have seasons or episodes, I never would’ve thought that such a request would also cover episodic content as well.
As for creating libraries, that’s great and I think I have about 30, but the automatically generated playlist “All Music” also includes all types of music as well as all audio book and radio shows. That is stupid and my only option is to delete the collection forever.
I would prefer to be able to “turn off” the various automatically generated playlists, but retain the option to re-enable them if I ever read about an update that might make them interesting/useful to me. Right now, they are neither.
Also, as I said, I wish I could easily create library-spanning playlists based on something like genre without needing to tediously select every individual item to be included. I suppose I might be able to do that by creating separate libraries for every “playlist” (different libraries can use the same folder(s), right?), but either way, I must manually select everything that goes into them.
Plex doesn’t store Genre per track. Only per album and per artist.
There is already another feature request to extend that to the track level.
Books have chapters and sometimes several parts as well.
The only automatically generated playlists I know of are made by Plexamp, when you install it the first time. And those playlists are easily deleted or modified.
2025 clean-up: topics addressed in other feature suggestions (closed as duplicate); partly covered and already possible using smart collections (implemented)
