Hey there- I’m a plex subscriber and have been for many years, but I only use Plex for my video content- movies and TV.
Music… is a bit of a different beast.
First off- Plex’s support for tags in music files could use improvement. I think the most common issue I see is that if Plex finds image files in the same directory as an album, it usually picks one of the images, rather than preferring images embedded in the audio files. Beyond that, Plex’s understanding of tags seems… incomplete. I believe it will ignore the “album artist” tag, which I usually use to tag collection albums (most frequently movie soundtracks with multiple artists), preferring the specific artist in each track. And then there’s some files where it goes off the rails- A few tracks show up with the year as the artist name. I’ll have to dig some more to figure out what’s going on for those. To be clear- I have my music collection fully organized- Artist/Year - Album/Track# - Track name.flac - and yes, my music collection is almost entirely in FLAC format. I’ve also tagged all my music with the app “Tag & Rename” - which I’ve been using for over a decade. It seems to be the best I’ve found for making sure my tags are in order, making sure every track has album artwork, etc.
Beyond getting tags straightened out, Plex Music could use one major feature; the ability to play to airplay and/or DLNA targets. I don’t need a full video-supporting target when I want to play my music- I’ve got the tablet to see what’s going on. Adding the ability to detect airplay and/or DLNA targets on the network and stream directly from the Plex media server to those targets would be a really big deal.
Lastly- the android client is… serviceable for browsing music, but not fantastic. Notably, it’s quite pokey about loading artwork. It also wants to throw more info at me than is needed; when I pick an artist, all I really need is the list of albums. Plex wants to tell me about who the artist is, if they’re playing a concert soon, etc etc - and then I have to scroll to see the albums. If it provided the albums first and just had a control to view the artist info, that would improve things substantially.
For reference- my current solution for my digital music is JRiver Media Center on my computer, Airfoil for Windows to capture it’s sound output and punt it across the network to my Marantz AVR which is an airplay target itself, and the JRemote Android app for browsing my collection and telling the JRiver MC application what to play. It’s decent as a solution, but requires the JRiver application (which isn’t a server or service) to be running, and requires intervention at the computer to turn on the airfoil capture to airplay. Many modern AVRs support airplay and/or DLNA
The Plex video support with roku client is and has been for quite a long time, a really really good solution for video content. If the Music support could be pushed forward a bit more, I could see dropping JRiver and using Plex exclusively for all my digital media.
Thanks!
