Seeking Advice on a Library for Radio Shows

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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I have a large back catalogue of radio shows which I used to categorise as ‘podcasts’ in iTunes before moving over to Plex. I’m just getting around to importing them, alongside adding my means of recording new shows, and I’m a bit stuck as to the best way to achieve a nice, organised library.

The files all have embedded artwork and metadata, and they’re all named in the convention used for TV shows. They’re all stored in a ‘Radio’ folder, under their own show name, so the path for a file looks like this:

/Somewhere/Show Name/Show Name - YYYY-MM-DD - Optional Info.m4a

Following an old post I created a ‘Music’ library called ‘Radio’ with the following settings:

  • Scanner: Plex Music Scanner
  • Agent: Personal Media Artists

The ‘Prefer local metadata’ and ‘Store track progress’ options are turned on.

This all largely works, but it’s a bit… well, it doesn’t work that well. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

‘Artists’ holds the radio station name, ‘Albums’ is the show name and displaying as folders sort of works (particularly “All Albums” sorted by Release Date) but when you click into an ‘Album’ (or Show) it uses the first day of the month as a track number and ‘release date’ is nowhere to be found as a sorting option. In fact, there are no sorting options.

To confound this, in virtually any other display mode ‘Release Date’ isn’t available as a sorting option. This isn’t so bad for new content added on the day, but archived stuff I’m going to import? That’s just going to get bunched up.

I’m no Plexpert but is there a way to customise the library to better display this content? Even including ‘Release Date’ in the “All Tracks” list view would be a start, so I could sort them better.

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Just giving this a shameless bump. Anybody out there have some creative solution?

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I’m interested in hearing what folks have done in this space as well, and what the possibilities are. I collect a few radio shows (some music, some speech), but they mostly sit in a folder on my server. I tried setting them up as a music library way back, and it was ugly. I worked on folder structure, file names, and tags, but can never get it right.

To me these things are more like podcasts or audiobooks than anything else, but those aren’t actual library types in Plex.

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It does seem like an oversight. I was hoping there would be a way to create custom libraries, but the lack of response from anybody with even a bodge solution makes me think this isn’t possible.

None of the current methods really fit the bill because they always lack one or more critical elements. Folders separate the shows really nicely and is easily controlled, but then you can’t sort the folder listing by anything useful. In fact, you can’t control the sort of a folder list at all.

You can add additional columns, which would be great apart from two major issues: the release date is missing as a column option, and even if you could select it, clicking the column header doesn’t sort the list. :confused:

If release date and column sorting in folder view could be added, that would be enough for me. I have more than 1000 episodes of one show, so having the newest always listed at the bottom of the folder view is just a touch inconvenient.

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So, in view of the lack of response I guess my best course of action is to appeal to the Plex developers to allow some method of sorting in folder view. Otherwise, Plex is a pretty poor solution to handling date-based audio media.

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I too have quite a few radio shows and have been unsuccessful like you.

My workaround is to just view my “Radio Show” library in “Folder” view.

Unfortunately that was the best i could come up with.

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Yeah, that falls over for me because there’s no sort by date.

For now each time I start listening to a different show I need to create a Smart Playlist for that show in my Radio library, which does allow date sorting. But this is a daft workaround which shouldn’t be necessary.

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