Server Version#: 1.29.2.6364
Player Version#: mobile app 4.5.3
TLDR: I am a DJ with a 160,000+ track library that has been using Plexamp for a couple years now. I MOSTLY have come to love it when it works as it should, but because Itunes plays a little more nicely with some of my DJ specific workflows I’ve been stuck straddling both worlds.
Sharing my experience with the community in the event its helpful, but would love to hear from others who are navigating this as well. Below is a bit of a summary of my current workflow and pain points.
Itunes/Music
Features
Automatic folder management based on artist/album when files are added
Bulk editing
Example: edit year tag for a long list of songs by different artists from different albums
DJ friendly
Both Traktor and Rekordbox can read itunes library and see all playlist types including smart playlists
Since DJ software can see everything in itunes I don’t need to make copies just to analyze and set tempo, key, beat grid, and cue points. And since Im not making copies, that info is saved in the files and is accessible the next time I bring them up. This would not be the case if I had to make copies of the music I hoped to work with in DJ software, which I suspect is the case with Plex Music.
If I DO need to make copies for some reason its easy to drag and drop files to your desktop
Smart playlists + 5 years of manual playlists
Cons
Automatic album and track ratings suck so much ass and scripts to disable them are janky
Music in itunes can have a track rating AND album rating
Album ratings can sometimes be added by itunes based on how you’ve manually rated songs in that album
If an album has been rated, itunes can assign automatic track ratings
I’ve never assigned an album rating, I’ve only ever removed ratings that have been applied automatically, and it feels like I’m constantly finding new stuff that I have to view in album view and manually set album rating to 0.
Plex Music
Features
Smart playlists
Plexamp is a super sweet mobile app
Grabs additional metadata and makes things look super nice
Cons
Prefers album artist over the normal artist field. This was a problem for me because up until moving to Plexamp for music I had basically ignored the album artist field and a large portion of my 160,000+ track library was missing album artist tags. Fixed in bulk by Mp3tag now that the new 64 bit version can handle my library.
You may think you want Plex to prefer embedded data but you actually don’t
Because I was missing album artist on a lot of stuff on my first scan attempt I saw a lot of incorrect tags being applied by plex. For example it would sometimes take the album artist tag for a collab album like “Aesop Rock & Tobacco” and would apply that to all of the releases from “Tobacco”. This occurred several times. All of my “Tame One” got tagged as “Del the funky homosapien and Tame One”, and all of my “Suicideboys” got tagged as “Travis Barker and Suicideboys”. I used Mp3tag to make sure everything had an album artist tag, deleted my music library and then readded, and it appears to have addressed the problem.
Itunes Import/Sync is janky
The automatic ratings issue with itunes is compounded by Plex. If something has an album rating set in itunes and not all of the tracks have track ratings assigned, Plex will sometimes apply the album rating to all tracks. For example, a “6lack” album showed up in plex with all tracks rated at 5 stars. In reality I had only tagged one track with 5 stars. Itunes automatically set the album rating to 5 stars, and when it scanned into Plex Plex applied 5 stars to all songs
This leads to tracks missing from imported itunes playlists
In general because of the size of my library Im having to do a lot of manual adding of missing tracks to imported playlists, or manual rating of tracks in plex that havent had their ratings pulled from itunes
MP3Tag
Features
view/filter for tracks missing metadata
Filter for files with bad/broken tags or errors
Bulk update album artist fields with artist field
Generate tag data from filenames by writing queries to identify relevant pieces in the name
Example: “01.Khalilinova - N1 XAM ft. Jesse Dor.mp3” with no tags, can generate track number, artist, and track title with the formula “%track%.%artist% - %title%”
Here’s what I have to say and I completely understand why I have seen DJ’s on this forum have a need or want to use Plex Server and PlexAmp, but their utility in its current form, or the past decade, was not its use case in mind, it’s truly centered around PERSONAL usage. The software license that’s included in the TOS on Plex Server and its clients are for PERSONAL use, not commercial.
You are purely free to share your personal thoughts and opinions about what you wish to see in the future but Plex did not put their software and apps out with DJ’s in mind.
I assisted with running an internet radio station in my youth in the 2000’s. As such we use to use WinAmp just to slide in some playlists. As we grew we needed more powerful tools, some as you listed. We looked around and while it was costly back then, we settled on using SAM DJ, which is now owned by Spacial Audio. We didn’t rely on iTunes as it lacked several major features that was necessary for DJ and radio play. The other arsenal in our tool box was Traktor DJ. These guys and their apps I mentioned have been around a lot longer for the purpose of providing tools for DJ’s and radio. Plex simply isn’t a product setup for that. The listening experience is on par with Spotify but it’s not as if Spotify offers BPM info either.
Additionally there seems to be a new open source, FREE (gotta love FREE) alternative out there called MIXXX that also incorporates iTunes and Traktor DJ music library’s. I haven’t used it myself but it’s definitely worth checking out since it’s free and open source.
Given that you went through great lengths to point out the flaws and nuances with PlexAmp, I rather have pointed out apps that gave you the necessary tools needed than bash in Plex, who’s purpose is centered around personal home usage.
No bashing intended! in fact I complimented Plexamp a few times in my post. I fully recognize my problem is with the fact that I have chosen not to abandoned itunes completely, and therefore have made myself an edge case. I actually love Plexamp for personal use and regular listening. I think if there was any bashing it was of Itunes?
Im quite happy with my current DJ setup (traktor for laptops, rekordbox for CDJs) so Im not interested in mixxx, nor was I attempting to get Plexamp to replace any DJ functions.
I’d go so far as to say Im not the only one with this stance as I’ve since found some additional tools like Webtools NG that allow you to export to M3U for use cases like I’ve described. Home · WebTools-NG/WebTools-NG Wiki · GitHub
apologies if this came off as Plex bashing, certainly not the intention.
I see you’re using Mp3Tag. So I’m guessing you’ve tried Picard and MediaMonkey. Would you describe your workflow for file/folder management? Some things are easy to do in BASH.
I haven’t tried Picard or MediaMonkey, and I only really made use of Mp3Tag to make sure everything had “Album Artist” tags.
Since I’m currently still using Itunes + Plex, my workflow is:
new music comes in from various sources at various times. rips, recordings, bandcamp downloads, soulseek for stuff not available elsewhere. it all gets tossed into a “Music - unsorted” folder.
that folder gets added to itunes, in my “to sort” playlist. when I have the time I’ll chip away at this playlist and rate tracks, fix tags, and add to relevant manual playlists. itunes handles file/folder management upon adding to itunes, and also moves files around as things are retagged if needed.
hmm itunes sounds helpful there. Take a swing at Picard which comes from Musicbrainz as you probably know. They are Plex’s primary source for matching content. Picard will do tags, filenames, folders, art. It does a good job with retail, but MP3Tag is supposed to be better in how it scans a lot of different databases for the music.
MediaMonkey is a windows only tool for managing audio only,
similar to how TinyMediaManager does movies and tv.
Probably not for you on Apple.
I guess all of these apps take a random folder of files and try to apply a set of rules that pulls out whatever metadata you tell it will be matching. Folks to collect live concerts have this sort chaotic naming problem. If you want some inspiration, I think there’s a guy who has a very advanced, giant set of rules to match his Grateful Dead shows on the MP3Tag forum.
It’s hurts a little when it takes me an hour to add one show to my collection
oh cool thanks for the context. Im running windows actually, just ended up being invested in itunes because I had a modded ipod with a large sdd prior to moving to plexamp (plus the DJ friendliness).
looks like I have some new tools to check out. part of me knows Im complicating my own situation but Im going to prioritize whatever solution makes DJing less of a pain in the ass. if its more annoying to do I’ll do it less and that will bum me out.
my problem is basically motivation and scale related lol. its not normally this extreme but Im sitting on 4000 new release bandcamp emails I want to get through to be caught up on the year, and my sorting playlist is sitting at 7160 tracks. I enjoy the results but need to streamline the work as much as I can.
okay to wrap things up I’ve decided to stick with itunes + plexamp for the easy file management and playlist compatibility with DJ software
thanks to 2 scripts from here: iTunes | Scripts for iTunes for Windows I was able to effectively disable track and album auto ratings in itunes meaning I can rely on smart playlists in plexamp again
thanks to bulk updating the album artist field of my collection with MP3Tag all of my weird album artist/collab album issues described above are no more
by cross referencing smart playlists of everything with ratings in plex and itunes I can say that only around 3% of ratings are missing in plex (likely due to this issue iTunes import fails due to Unicode in paths) and those I can likely fix at some point by building a smart playlist to look for a list of characters that I know cause issues
3% I can live with for now. totally fair trade off for not having to do my own file management and not needing to make copies of files to DJ with until I need to. stoked to be able to just enjoy Plexamp now.
