In the last Fireside you guys said you would be more responsive to feedback and work to address some longstanding problems, as well as increasing build quality. I think it is fair to say that overall, you have kept your word, so thanks. Please keep up the good work.
My own highest priority remains the reliability of core features like video playback. I don’t use Apple TV myself but I am heartened to see fixes for that client in progress, with a feedback thread. IMHO that kind of thing is critical.
Since you guys have made music into a big deal with Plexamp, making basic music functionality rock-solid also seems important, and we have had improvements there too – like per-track music genres. Cool. Please keep that up too and consider high value improvements like Composer support for classical music.
I could still list a bunch of pet issues, as could any user or staffer, but I am going to hold back and limit myself to just 2.
Number one: the remote access test in the web client is terrible. It starts green, then runs the test, then updates the indicator if needed. Every few days it seems like I see a confused user post saying “why does my remote access work for a few seconds and then stop working?” They do not understand that it never worked, and the test itself is confusing. This is a terrible user experience in what is already one of the most complex topics in Plex. Your users have wasted so much time on the “why does remote access only work for a few seconds” red herring. It’s awful and you should fix it.
Number two: the music library should be more tolerant of poorly organized tracks. We see a lot of users who are new to music in Plex struggling because they aim the server at their 25 year old folder of random mp3s and it blows up. I am sure you are aware that it is possible to see tracks filed under the wrong artist in Plex. This is super irritating and it leads users down the wrong path of fixing metadata in the Plex GUI instead of fixing their files. No matter how hosed a person’s music folder is, scrambling artists and tracks in the GUI should never happen.
Those users are not following your rules but my point is, the rules are hard for a lot of people to follow and are inconsistent with how a lot of people choose to organize their personal files. It’s great to have best practices but Plex should not explode if they are not followed, either.
We also see experienced users who are making an effort to organize their music by the rules still having problems, because the server is intolerant of errors.
“My other music servers don’t have this problem,” people often say, and that is fair criticism.
I have two specific suggestions here. One, as I already said, fix the issue that can cause artist/tracks to get scrambled.
Two, improve support for poorly organized music. I am not proposing changing all the normal rules and organization requirements. Leave that stuff alone, but you can add something new to help us out.
Here’s an idea: how about a new special Album Artist called “Singles?” It would get special handling, kind of like “Various Artists” does. Anything in the Singles folder would be exempt from the requirement to use an Album folder, for starters, and this folder would allow any user file structure they wish – people like their folders. The goal is that anything in the Singles folder shows up in Plex under the Singles Album Artist, and Plex is OK with there not being an Album structure. Tracks in Singles still have Artist, Genre, and Title which is enough to get by and use smart playlists. If Plex can look up metadata for these tracks, great, but if it cannot it should not blow up, either.
(I guess you’d have to tweak Sonic Analysis to function on music without albums, but each track already gets scanned, so hopefully that’s not a lot of work.)
“Singles” support isn’t just the onramp for people with messy collections. My music is organized how Plex wants, but some music can’t follow these rules. For example, I have a bunch of club music from Beatport and the concept of an album just doesn’t exist for these tracks. I have made a fake Album Artist called “Club Tracks” for this music and there is one giant “Club Misc” album in there. I do the same for some other album-less stuff like DJ mixes. But that’s not a great solution for reasons you can easily imagine.
Improving this issue is the new feature I want most in Plex!
Thanks for listening.
