Plex music has come a long way. In a world dominated by streaming music services, Plex music had reintroduced me to my music library and that is fantastic. However, music almost requires a separate application. There’s so much functionality around the UX that is specific to music that the current app has some strong limitations. I have created a list below that I think will help guide some healthy discussion for the next steps of the Plex music integrations.
Caching / Downloading
Every song that is played should be cached up to a user defined limit of storage space.
If a song can be fetched over WiFi at a higher quality than the currently cached instance, re-fetch and cache again.
Every song that is played is moved to the top of the cache. Oldest played song in cache is removed.
Caching in an automated way is important for a lot of reasons. Personally, I ride my bike a lot and I listen to a huge variety of music. I currently use a streaming service in that scenario because quite simply I can cache almost every playlist I have and all of my saved songs. There’s no solid way to do this in Plex. Yes, I can download a playlist. But, as you can see below, and as other people have expressed here, the playlist functionality in Plex leaves a lot to be desired.
Lists
Create a list of top Artists, Albums, and Songs based on playback history
Allow user to pin items in each category
Pinning is the same as the current download for offline use, but can be integrated into the caching mechanism above such that these items supersede items that are cached during normal playback.
Playlists
Since we’re already using our own music library, which I have already spent quite a bit of time organizing…
Plex should honor any playlist files found in the library directory
Plex should have the ability to import/export playlists
Create playlists from search
Example: Filter/search for all songs that include “Artist” in Artist field, featured field, song title, etc… Ability to create playlist for these advanced search filters allows for fun dynamic playlists.
Dynamic playlists
Example: Create a playlist for all new songs added to my library in the category of Americana
Libraries
I have multiple folders of music. Some stuff I have archived over the years because I wanted to keep it, but don’t want to listen to it a lot. This might be a specific use case but I figured the functionality is worth sharing in case others are experiencing the same thing.
Sub-libraries
Add a Music Library as a root folder. Plex can then scan all of the music in there. You can then create a sub-library based on folders within that root library.
Example: /music has subfolders ‘/archive’, ‘/new’, and ‘/library’ … new music is just that, new music. library is the music I like and want to listen to consistently. archive is old music that I want to keep but don’t want to listen to all the time.
I would like the ability to shuffle all based on those folders or sub-libraries. Maybe today I just want to listen to new music, try to find something new. Maybe I want to do Hip-Hop radio on my new music folder to find some new songs. Or Americana, or Blues, etc. Perhaps I just want to chill to my archived Led Zeppelin collection and other similar music.
Adding support for folders adds the ability to create even more interesting dynamic playlists. Even something like a weekly discover playlist based on listening habits that shows songs from the new folder you might enjoy.
Hopefully some of these suggestions are helpful. I’ve really enjoyed the addition of music support in Plex and I hope the team continue to grow it.
Yeah, most what you seem to want re: filters within a library can already be done with smart playlists (filter, save as playlist). Also, you can already make different libraries from different root folders, and search across all of them.
The option to build more powerful (nested) queries would be cool though.
You’re right on that. I made this list over time as I used the app more for music. I meant to post it sooner but it just got lost in my notes. I am using the dynamic playlists a bit now, but they’re still limited. For example, I cannot create a playlist of music recently added to my library that was released within the last 6 months. I was looking at how to make a playlist for an artist, but I can’t find a way to do something like this: create a playlist for all songs with with Diplo in the Artist field OR Diplo in the track title field.
So yes, there are dynamic lists, but they could be so much more powerful with some simple AND/OR joining and more field options.
Not entirely true. You can see my other comment on the dynamic playlists. The start is there but it could be better. As far as having multiple libraries, this is not the same as having one library with sub-libraries. But the difference probably isn’t great enough that it would be worth the dev time for it.
This is a critical missing feature for me which facilitates efficient usage of cellular data and is supported out-of-the-box by some Plex competitors. Plex is a feature rich solution and the library metadata scraping is awesome. I would love to be able to consolidate to a single media streaming service on my server, but I am having to use other solutions for music streaming to my mobile in the meantime.
I appreciate the dev team’s consideration in adding these capabilities.
I like everything you have suggested. I recently canceled my Spotify and started using Plex for Music. I have quite a collection that I have gathered over the years from friends/family and also from iTunes and Google. It is great that Plex is able to organize these files into a nice library, however some major things are missing to make it a Spotify alternative.
Better dynamic playlists is a must. What I liked about Spotify was it would continue playing songs, even after my playlist had ended. It was able to look back at what I have listened too and make suggestions based on that. It was always spot-on.
Caching is another feature we need. I often find that driving around in poor cell coverage causes playback to stop outright and then I have to open the app again and hit play. Spotify was pretty seamless in the same poor coverage areas.
All of this on a dedicated Plex Music app would be great. I might even consider signing up for Tidal integration
