I’m trying to navigate my music library in a way that goes just slightly beyond trivial. Using the Android app I can’t filter the list of tracks by genre. The only way to filter by genre is apparently by switching to the “Album” view.
Applying the “jazz” filter to the list of albums appears to result in a list containing all albums that contain at least one track categorized as “jazz”.
However, tapping on the album shows me **all **the tracks belonging to that album, even if **none **of them except one are jazz. I can’t even determine which of those tracks caused it to be selected by the “jazz” filter, because there’s really no information presented beyond the track name and length (certainly not a genre).
Grumble grumble…
It seems whenever I get one problem solved Plex throws up another one. I just don’t understand how such a popular media player can’t get obvious things like this right. Albums don’t have genres! Tracks do!
Sorry for venting. I guess I’m hoping against hope that somebody can tell me I’m wrong and show me the round about way to achieve what I’m looking for. If not, is this something the Plex team knows about and might consider fixing?
Personally I think they both do. People like artists (and buy whole albums) because they’re mainly a specific genre. You can’t pick up a classical album and find it littered with punk rock. That said, tracks should also have genres, sub genres, or tags. Personally I like the tags option as even assigning a genre to a track isn’t always enough.
Here again though shows Plex isn’t paying as much attention to the music side of things. It is so close to being an awesome music player, but focusses on tweaking video related items instead for the most part.
Personally I think they both do. People like artists (and buy whole albums) because they’re mainly a specific genre.
What you say may be true for someone who primarily purchases compilations that cater to one specific genre, but otherwise I don’t see it that way at all. I have hundreds of albums where no genre is represented by more than two or three tracks.
I suspect this might be a function of how detailed we are with our genre classifications.
If you specify everything that isn’t “Rock”, “Pop”, “Classical” or “Jazz” as “Electronic” (I’m exaggerating to make a point), then sure, you won’t have much variance. If that isn’t good enough for you (for me it isn’t), and you differ between Techno, House, Trance, Industrial, Big Beat, Breakbeat, New Age, Ambient, etc. then you’ll quickly have many albums with a lot of different genres. I also specify multiple sub-genres of “Rock”, “Jazz” and other genres. Given that specificity I’d say most artists don’t confine themselves to just one type of music.
Fact is, the way Plex deals with genres now simply doesn’t reflect reality. If the Plex team would instead handle genres the way almost every other media organizer/player in the world does, then that wouldn’t make life any more difficult for people like you, while making the Plex music experience so much better for everyone else. There’s literally no downside to doing this the right way.
IMHO the way it is now is broken to the point of making Plex useless for my genre-based music listening sessions, which is a shame since I really like Plex otherwise.
This has always been the argument, it isn’t actually a new one. When coming up through all sorts of open source media players in the early days it was had quite a bit. I’m 41 and I grew up in a time where you did primarily buy albums. It’s not like that any more. I agree tracks should have genre’s too. And in fact, given the choice, the track genres should be implemented before album genre’s as it’s more useful.
Either way, I agree, it should be done!
I’m in the same boat as “a5cent”. My library is almost useless. I have thousands of electronic tracks with no way to get them in a genre-based playlist without going through them one by one. I upvoted the Feature request too. Hopefully it gets added sooner, rather than later.
I’ve actually turned to other solutions for now. Plex just doesn’t cut it for music. So close to being awesome, but so far away. I hate it that the sound quality is reduced to 320kbps for synced music, and the interface is not great, it doesn’t work well at home through a stereo, again especially because the quality is reduced. It’s so close I can almost touch it!
Anyway, my whole library is fed through TuneUp first so that genre’s etc are in the actual song metadata (by track) which doesn’t fix the plex problem, but does mean other audio players pick it up. I’ve converted a raspberry pi to include a Hifiberry DAC+Pro and have it feeding into a mini fatman tube amp. On the raspberry pi I tend to run squeezebox because it has a nice interface, though I also have run rune.
All in all a noticably better sound than plex. It also supports apple airplay.
I tend to agree there are two use cases and I don’t see why both can’t be implemented. So, Album genre tag and track genre tag. These are pulled from elsewhere obviously and that part is out of Plex control. Otherwise tags. Tags would be cool.
