Theme Music, Renaming TV Shows, and Extracting uploaded posters and covers.

Others have offered information on adding theme music to Plex, but I want to offer my success and solutions to help out too. First, yes, you can add your own theme music to movies and tv shows and as of today April 10, 2022 with the Windows Server Build Plex Server Version 4.76.1 found some interesting things.

  1. As others have said, yes, name your mp3 sound file to theme.mp3 and place it in the same folder as your movie. Additionally, I found out that if you have a collection set of movies and are all in the same folder then every time you open up 1 of those movie pages in Plex, the same theme.mp3 file will play. Currently, it plays for however long your theme.mp3 file is, which could be 30 seconds, 1 minute, or longer. Also, while others say to put the theme.mp3 file in each separate movie file folder, if your trilogy or quadrilogy has same theme, you can put all movies in same folder as the theme.mp3 file and each time you open up any of those movies, the same theme plays.
  2. Folder Structure is important only if you want theme music or if you have addition related movie content, like shorts or scenes, but if you only want movie files you can put them in the same folder. This might be a good solution for a small set of favorite movies running on a different server. (It’s the down and dirty approach to get Plex up and running quickly without any frills)
  3. The Plex Dance? Some have different approaches to it’s definition or description, but my experience to the Plex Dance is where you decide to move files around a bit and all of a sudden your theme.mp3 sound isn’t working. Well, my solution was to move the movie folder out of Plex, rescan, empty trash, refresh metadata, move folder back to where it was, rescan, refresh metadata and theme now works again.
  4. For TV shows, you may get lucky and Plex will have the theme play with no need for you to put in a theme.mp3 file, but if you need one, you can place it in the folder above your season folders.
  5. For making a mp3 theme file, I cut out a clip from the movie using Handbrake, then convert it to mp3 with VLC, then trimmed out the audio with Audacity. All free programs.
  6. I found that Collection pages currently don’t play theme sound files, so you will need to go into the actual Plex movie pages to hear it. If they get that working, I wish they could have separate custom playlists and have the ability to have theme music for that too.
  7. Order your Agents priorities to have Local Media Assets (Movies) as the top number 1 priority. These agents can be dragged and dropped to change their order and you want to make sure Local Media Assets (Movies) is on top to get the theme.mp3 file playing.
  8. I wasn’t able to get the theme.mp3 file play for photos either, but I guess it may not make sense. It would if photos had a Collection option where you could movie still shots slideshows.

I’m still learning as I go and for a free program, they offer the best solution. It may not be what you want exactly, but I’ve seen the competition and Plex offers the best and if you want a bit more you can pay them for Plex Pass. Luckily, they decided to offer their coolest features for free.

Plex may appear to cause headaches and long hours of work, but many people have been using it with very large libraries, so they figured out how to work around certain issues.

TV Shows and how to name theme fast.

  1. I found the free program “Rename My TV Series” to be a great solution to get Plex to recognize my content the fastest.

Extracting or Exporting Uploaded Posters or Covers.

  1. I spent hours creating some posters and covers for some of my content and after spending twice as much time trying to find a way to get those files back after I mistakenly removed them after putting them in Plex. - But, I figured out how to get them back!!! - It wasn’t easy, but if your library isn’t that big yet and you did this all within the same day or recent days, you can find your files. - - After you upload your file into Plex, it renames it and removes the file extension. Like Spider-Man.jpg becomes “d756939fd9b03d6cbb3552d71777e9b624beb497”. It’s placed in a folder like E:\Plex \ Plex Media Server\ Metadata\ Movies\ f\ 98db1fab40cb231f15abe7b7204698ea8c46510.bundle\Uploads\posters. Finding your files may not be easy, but they are all in these types of folders. I copied the files, like “d756939fd9b03d6cbb3552d71777e9b624beb497” to a new file and renamed 001.jpg and the next to 002.jpg, ect. and then just viewed them to find what I was looking for. I tried other ways and online tools, but gave up and found this as the only thing that I could count on. Like I said, it won’t be easy, but if you want your image files bad enough, then you can do it. - REMBER NOT to change the existing Plex file, like “d756939fd9b03d6cbb3552d71777e9b624beb497”, just copy it and rename it, then either move it to your own location or delete it, leaving the original files in place and undisturbed.

4.76.1 is the version number for the Plex Web interface.

For the Plex Media Server version look in Settings → Server_Name → General or in your list of Authorized Devices.

Agent priorities in Settings → Agents do not apply if you are using the Plex Movie scanner and agent for movies and the Plex TV Series scanner and agent for TV Shows.

When using those scanners/agents, customization is on a per-library basis. Edit the library, choose Advanced, set desired options (use local metadata, use local files, etc.).

Plex Documentation
→ Libraries → Editing Libraries
→ Scanners & Agents → Advanced Settings Plex Movie Agent and Advanced Settings Plex TV Series Agent

Partially correct.

For TV shows, folder structure is very important.

For movies, Plex has the ability to perform partial scans, scanning only the added media (Settings → Library → Run a partial scan when changes are detected). Each movie must be in a separate folder for this to work. When you have all the movies in a single folder and add a new one, Plex scans existing as well as new movies. This does not matter on a small library, but for large libraries (hundreds of movies), partial scans can cut down the time needed to add new media to a library.

Another reason to place movies/shows in individual folders.

You can add the cover art in the folder with the media. No need to import it into the Plex database.

Plex Documentation → Your Media
→ Naming & Organizing Your Movie Files
→ Local Media Assets – TV Shows

All true and good points. - Thanks.

Prioritizing local metadata is not needed for theme music and will do more harm than good for the overwhelming majority of users.

Some additional follow-up:

You can also use WebTools-NG to export existing posters and art. It can run on a different host than your Plex Media Server. Click on Assets to see available downloads.

I ran a quick test with WebTools installed on my Windows 10 desktop. I was able to export artwork/posters to my PC from my Plex Media Server running on Ubuntu.

See the link below. You can setup a custom export. Drag the desired fields from Available to Custom.

The Wiki link on the GitHub page has additional information on installation, configuration, etc.

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