Hi, I’ve been trying out the new PlexAmp, and it’s a very beautiful thing, but I’m a bit taken aback that there’s no way to view by composer (well, you can search, but you can’t browse).
This renders it pretty much useless for classical music, and seems an odd omission given the years (and years) that people have been asking for this in Plex.
Hoping this is just something you haven’t quite got to yet…
(oh, the other surprising thing is that, in the ‘all artists’ view, there appears to be no way to jump to a specific point in the alphabet; it’s a long way down to Frank Zappa
But, not to end on the negatives, it looks and sounds great!
Plexamp is still a Plex client. It can only work with what is on the Plex server. And ‘composer’ is unfortunately not stored on the server.
Plexamp tries to introduce a different approach to music.
My advice: Stop browsing and instead start using all the radios, the mix builder, and maybe create some clever ‘smart playlists’ with your own criteria.
I did add my name to a similar thread in… good lord, September 2017. Might as well try this one too I suppose.
Maybe if the Plex people could outline what they think a music server/player should (and should not) be doing, we could all save ourselves a lot of time and frustration.
This is clearly an issue which is stopping me moving to Plex Premium.
Even open source media players such as Kodi have now better support for Classical Music than Plex (but still not ideal).
This topic has been going on for years, and it seems to be at a complete standstill.
At some point I’ll just get bored managing two media solutions for video and music, and move to a solution which support both adequately.
There are many tools which enable tagging appropriately music with full and extended metadata.
Plex should be able to read these tags and use them to support browsing.
Add a few (3-5) “Custom attributes” in the music data model: composer is just one of the attributes useful to browse a large music library. For classical music, another important attribute is “Work” but there are others such as “Performers”. Other types of music may need other attributes. Different tagging agents may code metadata differently. To build a robust feature, there should be some flexibility and ability to customize. User may define the label under which these attributes are displayed in the UI.
In search agent setup, the user should be able to specify how these custom attributes are linked to metadata: link with a local file metadata tag, link to a search agent search field.
In the UI, when enabled, these custom attributes can be selected in the browsing list (currently limited to “Artists”, “Albums” and “Tracks”). They should also be added as search criteria.
Ideally, the user should be able to specify the browsing hierarchy: Composer > Work > Album, or Artist > Composer > Album,
Add support for multiple artists for the same track. Enable the user to specify the separators for artists names.
Good points. What’s ironic is that for music, I’m currently using a combination of the Asset UPnP server and the foobar2000 mobile client. Asset lets me specify pretty much whatever browsing tree I want. And UPnP isn’t exactly state-of-the-art…
Celebrating five years of that feature request sitting in the wilderness.
I actually came to Plex because of Sonos’ deficiencies in managing large libraries, but I’ve swapped one problem for another. The Classical section of my music collection is by far the largest and most complex, and lack of even rudimentary Composer support (added to last.fm’s input despite me putting local metadata first) just makes a mess of it all.
Plex’s poor presentation exacerbates that with insufficient display space for Album Artist [Composer] names, let alone work or album titles. Anyone looking at my music display in Plex might be forgiven for thinking I only listened to a bunch of artists called “Johannes …”
not at the moment, sorry, only because i don’t have anything concrete to share. but we’ve talked about it lots and definitely have some list items to work on.
