After a 2-3 years watching Plex develop, I’ve come back to see if things have improved. I’m in the process of updating my Windows server to UNRAID - and perhaps switching from My Movies/WMC to Plex.
My first set of questions concerns music… I am a +60 year musician that has worked entirely in the professional recording, media archiving and broadcast industries I have a lot of music and all the screenshots on Plex’s site shows a bunch of random album covers; they are not sorted by name, artist, genre or anything that I can detect.
Are there screenshots of how Music libraries get organized - or can be organized by a user?
I’d also like to understand how Plex creates that organization - hopefully via metadata… or reading the WMP database which is also used by WMC.
I have a large library of surround music generally stored as DTS extensions. Do these show in my music library as well? (It was a bit of a trick this to work in WMC/WMP)
firstly - musicbrainz, plex uses it, be familiar with it.
secondly introduce your music slowly so you get a feel for how it organizes - take your time, there is no rush if you introduce a small amount at a time you can get a sense for how it works and work with it!
and your custom stuff you want to enable local metadata and assets.
if you don’t have a plex pass and are into music, i do recommend it mostly for the excellent plexamp.
lastly, have fun. I moved from WMC (with the old media browser, now emby) a few years ago and would never go back now in a million years, library radio for me in plexamp has really changed my music experience.
I strongly urge you to stick to this file organization:
/Music
/Artist Name (of the whole album)
/Album Title
01. TrackArtist - Song Title.ext
02. TrackArtist - Song Title.ext
Same applies to sampler albums and sound tracks etc.
Which means you need to define an “Album Artist” name for the whole album and use that both in the folder names and the embedded AlbumArtist meta tags.
Plex doesn’t use the “Compilation” flag like you may know from iTunes.
I recommend you to start only with a few artists and albums.
Then add more in batches, after inspecting their organization and embedded meta tags.
Screenshots:
OK… so no screenshots. A picture is worth a thousand words - literally - on how things get organized.
Organization: @musicbrainz: This is the point - I am not interested in a journey down the wrong road and I’d prefer to do my due-diligence BEFORE I move to Plex.
@ OttoKerner: I don’t use iTunes. Also, I will not reorganize the folder structure of 800 GB’s of music - sorry, that’s a non starter. Mine is currently:
/Music
/Artist Last Name, Artist First Name (YEAR) - Album Name
01 - Song Title.
02 - Song Title.
If this does not work with Plex, I’ll move on.
Nothing on surround music files and how Plex handles it…
What makes me worried is that both of you suggest starting with a small batch of Artists/albums. What is the concern?
Also - no one can explain how PLEX organizes music? As I’ve stated, nothing in the product pages give a good idea about this - except perhaps that there are album covers. With the serious lack of info there, I have no interest in wasting my time.
If you have multi-channel flac files, Plex can handle them quite well.
If on the other hand you have ac3 or dts files, not very much so.
The difference is Plex’s inablitly to read embedded meta tags from container formats which are able to house ac3 or dts audio streams.
You will probably in a world of hurt with this.
Because of the above. If you simply point Plex to your files as-they-are, you will probably get a major mess.
Exactly how I outlined the folder organization above.
There are “Album Artists” as the highest hierarchy level.
Each Album Artist can have Albums.
Each Album can have Tracks.
You can choose to look at this collection in various ways.
You can use the hierarchical way to making your way by picking the artist first, then dive down into their albums.
Or you can look at all albums at once.
You can sort or filter all music by various means, like release date, title, artist, genre…
Unfortunately then, PLEX is not for me. Thank you OttoKerner for advising me in this regard.
Its also why the try/buy model - although useful - is not always the best approach until one has ticked off some important boxes.
As a software developer, building a database based on a file structure model is a very old school - and highly inadvisable… or its lazy. (re: easy to do - but problematic.)
In regards to surround: the lack of ability to handle DTS and AC3 - or other audio only surround files is also a non-starter. Multichannel FLAC files is no different then multi-channel WAVE files; surround AV receiver need to know what the dialog/centre channel levels are. Its not a professional format IMHO. The old argument on “non-compressed” audio with FLAC was dead 10 years ago when DTS-HDMA and then later Dolby TrueHD became available. I’m not sure how PLEX can advertise “Audiophile” only in a stereo context. Immersive audio anyone?
