Provide a Plex cloud stored music database

Feature Suggestions
1

I just wanted to continue a discussion from the fireside discussion. I wrote this:

"Are there any plans to provide a Plex cloud stored music database, as you already do for movies and tv shows? (for clarification, I’m not talking about your streaming service - only the database)

I understand the metadata would be less consistent. I also understand the magnitude of such a database compared to movies and shows.

However, I think the positives would outweigh those factors. For example “watch sync” could then include the whole Plex ecosystem, with music playcounts and music ratings being synced to the users account.

Furthermore, the discovery part of Plex, with the friend activity and everything would benefit greatly from this. For example you can maybe display what the users top tracks are, etc. This would advertise the much underrated music capability of Plex. Especially with the rise of Plexamp. And you could share tracks and etc like with movies.

Also, with this in place, one could imagine, further down the line, having “listen together” work similarly to “watch together” but that’s a bit beside the point."

@McWanke then replied:

"Unfortunately, not right now. This has come up multiple times and has some employee support but you mentioned some of the reasons this is a big challenge. You called out the magnitude of the size of the database but that isn’t that big of a challenge (we can scale up a db size pretty easily).

The bigger issues would be around the matching and handling of the sheer number of tracks. I ran a few quick google searches to show how hard this would be (note I have no clue how accurate these numbers are, I think they are more relevant to show the magnitude differences between databases). In these google searches i saw a number of ~130k movies in tmdb and ~625k for imdb. We already have challenges with just movies and that doesn’t take into account tv shows with different airing orders vs dvd orders and many, many more episodes. The google search for musicbrainz showed 30+ million recordings and 42+ million tracks. This would present a massive challenge, hence no current plans to create this."

I’m having a few questions about that. Maybe @McWanke can keep giving some insights? I’m genuinely curious and I seriously believe some more thoughts should go into this.

  1. Since you already use MusicBrainz as the source of the metadata in quite the similar way to TheMovieDB, how is the amount of data a problem? If a movie matches on TMDB then it matches. If it doesn’t, then the movie is not part of the sync etc.

The exact same would be true with music, no? If it matches on MusicBrainz, it does. If it does not, then it’s not part of the sync/database features?

I genuinely do not understand how 30 million different recordings would be different from 100k movies in this sense, especially since you say that scaling is not an issue.

  1. You already have listen.plex.tv which is extremely similar to watch.plex.tv. So the backend is already set up. Currently, this only serves as sharing tracks between Plexamp users. Why such overkill if this is not in the plans?

  2. This is not so much a question, but it’s clear that you already cache music metadata in the cloud to some capacity, and sync it on regular intervals.

So, taking 2 and 3 together, it’s almost like all the technical stuff is already set up, at least partly. Or am I missing something? :slight_smile: