Multiple ways to get information about music files beyond online dbase
Hi All,
I would like to propose an alternative/additional way to categorize music with the Plex server. Currently, it seems the only way Plex organizes and gathers information about your music collection is by scanning (scrapping) online databases and tries to match up the info. I believe this approach to be appropriate for Movies / TV shows, but not for music. To start, .mp3 files support metadata and have information about the song already inside of them. Second, lots of people (myself included) are or have used Itunes or a similar tool to already label and organize their collection. When I asked Plex to create a database of my music collection it took over 3 days (yes I have a ton of music), but the end results were really disappointing. Only a small percentage of my music appeared with the correct names or any identifiable information. Unlike movies, where you can separate out different versions of a movie fairly easier by the year it was made, music is much more complex. There can be several slight variations in the name of the track, different artists can be listed for the same song differently, different versions of the same song are produced either by the same artist or different artists etc. I would propose an alternate way of organizing music. I would suggest giving the user 3 options: 1. Just scrape the music (as it currently works). 2. Grab metadata information from the .mp3 files, and/or import a itunes library file first then load collection that was organized by same file to get any additional info. 3. a combination approach using both the metadata and online databases, allowing the user to resolve conflicts or allow Plex to resolve them using certain rules etc.
I believe this will make using music collections inside Plex more functional. As it currently stands, I can't really access my music through Plex, which makes me sad.
One additional note, I would love to see support for Itunes playlists (or at least accept .m3u files (which are converted files from itunes format). I know you currently can share your itunes library that's on another computer, but the itunes stuff should be loaded into Plex along with the collection and not separated out.
