There is no solution to watch my freestanding music video collection? Do I need to have a track/ or album of an artist to see that corresponding music video?
Yes that is the idea of how the Plex team see this working - ie music videos tie in with your existing music collection.
However, if you dont have a music collection, or donāt want this ātie inā then you can still add your music videos to your library - just add them as a new Movies library. It will work straight away but if youāre picky about the ābells and whistlesā that make it all look and feel cool - then you have to tinker a bit to get the right cover artwork and metadata describing the music video etc.
Despite Plex being an AMAZING tool, I find their implementation of Music Videos to be extremely primitive.
It took me a long time to figure out exactly what was going on - and I share it here just in case anyone was as CONFUSED as I was.
The music videos you have for a given artist? They donāt show up on the artist page.
They show up in the artistās ALBUM page
Unfortunately, to confuse the living hell out of you, they DO include VEVO music videos on the ARTISTāS page. Also unfortunately, you STILL have to have at least ONE song by that artist to ātriggerā the artist to appear in Plex at all.
So, here is an example:
I have a music folder with this particular hierarchy:
x:/MP3S////artist - song.mp3
ā¦ for our example ā¦
x:/MP3S/O/Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark/The Best Of O.M.D./Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark - Enola Gay.mp3
I have a music videos folder in this particular hierarchy:
y:/videos///artist - song.avi|mpg|mp2|mp4|etc
ā¦ for our example ā¦
y:/videos/o/Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark/Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark - Enola Gay.avi
Once you set up the global folder, etc. as indicated ā¦
1, Go to MUSIC in Plex
2. Select Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark
3. Select the album The Best of O.M.D.
4. Find Enola Gay on the track list (itās #3 for me)
5. Look over by the track run time. There is a little TV
6. Click the little TV
7. YOUR video plays
Entirely too much work and entirely anti-intuitive for a brilliant tool like Plex to require of us.
@darkuni said:
The music videos you have for a given artist? They donāt show up on the artist page.They show up in the artistās ALBUM page
WOW. I was refreshing the album page over and over trying to figure out why videos would not show upā¦ Thank you.
@darkuni said:
Despite Plex being an AMAZING tool, I find their implementation of Music Videos to be extremely primitive.It took me a long time to figure out exactly what was going on - and I share it here just in case anyone was as CONFUSED as I was.
The music videos you have for a given artist? They donāt show up on the artist page.
They show up in the artistās ALBUM page
Unfortunately, to confuse the living hell out of you, they DO include VEVO music videos on the ARTISTāS page. Also unfortunately, you STILL have to have at least ONE song by that artist to ātriggerā the artist to appear in Plex at all.
So, here is an example:
I have a music folder with this particular hierarchy:
x:/MP3S////artist - song.mp3
ā¦ for our example ā¦
x:/MP3S/O/Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark/The Best Of O.M.D./Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark - Enola Gay.mp3
I have a music videos folder in this particular hierarchy:
y:/videos///artist - song.avi|mpg|mp2|mp4|etc
ā¦ for our example ā¦
y:/videos/o/Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark/Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark - Enola Gay.avi
Once you set up the global folder, etc. as indicated ā¦
1, Go to MUSIC in Plex
2. Select Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark
3. Select the album The Best of O.M.D.
4. Find Enola Gay on the track list (itās #3 for me)
5. Look over by the track run time. There is a little TV
6. Click the little TV
7. YOUR video playsEntirely too much work and entirely anti-intuitive for a brilliant tool like Plex to require of us.
At this point, who knows. I see that little TV but the video that plays has āVevoā stamped at the upper-left. My own video file doesnāt.
Regardless, absolutely. This is absurd.
Here it is. Plex is essentially about three things: media organization, media discovery, and media access. Itās obvious that the dev team is focused on the third, and has done a bang-up job at it. But that work has sadly been to the exclusion of the second (see my feature request on actually useful filtering) and especially the first. Anyone migrating to the Plex ecosystem from XBMC, eg, has done so painfully aware of the media organization and metadata management tradeoffs, and they are impactful.
Should it really be a herculean effort to let us create a Music Videos library to just look through videos we know we own instead of forcing us to choose between a threadbare video list or rooting through a massive multilayered music library to find a specific video we must have decided in advance weāre looking for? Organization fail. Discovery fail. Attention Plex Management: PLEASE direct your attention to the other two important aspects of this service.
2 Likes
Having read this thread, Iām not sure that many will persevere with this somewhat awkward method to coerce MusicVideos into Plex. So you need at least one audio file per artist for every artist you have music videos for? What if you donāt? Well you canāt see them!
Also if you say have music videos stored as eg:
c:\MusicVideos\Indie\Killers - Mr Brightside.mp4
Then Plex will ignore the metadata within the video file itself, ignore the Artist - Song.mp4 filename and instead decide as the outer folder is named Indie (my musicvideos are stored by genre) that MUST be the artist name so wonāt match up (just tested this).
Why canāt I add c:\music AND/OR c:\musicvideos to a music library as any other folder instead of some special global folder kludge, then:-
- Plex reads in video files like any other music file, using the metadata/filename/folder structure in that order of precedence for video files so no forced directory structure.
- Add MusicVideos to Artists/Albums/Tracks drop-down to show just MusicVideos (+ allow genre filtering)
- Viewing by Artist currently shows Videos under albums which is good but needs option to include MusicVideo Artists or not, so standalone MusicVideo library would function.
- Viewing by Track should show both audio & video tracks.
You could then choose to have a totally standalone MusicVideo Library (as many above need)
OR one with Music & Videos merged (add both paths to lib if videos not inline), but still with ability to just see MusicVideos.
convertapple, I am so with you. I have many music videos with no corresponding artist in my music library. Itās as ridiculous as not letting you add a movie starring an actor unless you also have an audiobook he narrated.
Addressing this is obviously not a priority for the Plex developers, whose focus is plainly to widen the platform reach and polish their new UI.
Weaknesses in user control of media organization and discovery is the only reason many still are wistful over XBMC/Kodi.
1 Like
I updated code to my program (not released update yet) to generate all the nfo/thumbs and switched to using Kodi. Once you control the metadata you can get your setup pretty much as you like. This is now running fine on about 15 devices.
However I returned to the Plex conundrum yesterday when I re-enlisted 2 old ATV3ās running Plex-Connect. I was interested in seeing how well I could configure Plex by using the nfo+thumbs I had already set up for Kodi. After much experimentation it works pretty well albeit with a few annoying bugs/issues, this being one of them.
Not being a coder (or, in this day and age, feeling particularly like someone should have to be to get all this to work) Iām stuck with using the ecosystem producing the least flawed experience. I may experiment later, but at this point my vast media collection and I are probably in too deep. I pray that the devs donāt act like they know this.
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I read all the article linked above, and the 3 pages in this post to find that I canāt have a Video Music LIBRARY (without music library), funny indeed because are many people asking this feature and the only solution is creating a music library.
I think the customization of the features or functions in one program like PLEX is essential to organize our media files in the way what we want, not all people have the same organization or structure in their files, and try to understand this on the point of view of coders will be greatly appreciate for all users. Hope this feature will be avaliable in soon future.
Best regards.
@Mr_MnM said:
I read all the article linked above, and the 3 pages in this post to find that I canāt have a Video Music LIBRARY (without music library), funny indeed because are many people asking this feature and the only solution is creating a music library.I think the customization of the features or functions in one program like PLEX is essential to organize our media files in the way what we want, not all people have the same organization or structure in their files, and try to understand this on the point of view of coders will be greatly appreciate for all users. Hope this feature will be avaliable in soon future.
Best regards.
Iām with you. Totally.
As the thread starter, Iād like it to be considered a feature request. I thought creating a music videos library would be fairly easy and intuitive, but obviously thatās not the case.
Please, people from Plex, make this happen. Just use common sense while working at it.
EDIT: hereās another approach: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/215763/music-video-library-plus-shuffle-music-videos
Ok I have this setup using a global folder.
D:/Music Videos
D:/Music - has music
Everything is working as expected I just want to view all my music videos together either in a library or with some filter does anyone have a method without putting each one into a playlist or something?
I saw some indication that music videos may be supported differently now than before. Has anyone noticed? I tried setting it up, but didnāt see anything different.
How are you guys setting it up now?
I wish Plex would properly support music videos .This is the way I do it. Itās clunky and a lot of work, but itās something. (This was referred to previously but the link went bad, this one works.)
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Same here. I wish that they would stop working on Tidal and focus on adding functions customers want.
SOMETHING has changed.
Ive had all my music videos just dumped in a folder and added as their own video type library, but there was no metadata and id just shuffle the whole library or something. Most of them were just scraped from youtube and all the youtube file data in parentheses was always included in the titles.
Not the case anymore, everything appears to be more cleanly titled now, but its still not sortable in any effective way and theres still not actually an agent, all the years are mostly based on the file date. Mostlyā¦? So even though it looks like theres a functional dashboard now, its still not very.
I think part of the problem is the back end, music videos are hardly as well cataloged as movies and TV, and theres no working agent for the IMVDb. https://imvdb.com/developers/api
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doesnāt appear much has changed since last post on this topic. Mine looks alot like Cyno01 above. As mentioned, there is likely no source for metadata as reliable as thetvdb, themoviedb etc. This said ā¦ a couple of simple changes would improve this by quite a bit.
- With the absence of a strong data source, put some priority of the subfolder within which the videos reside and naming conventions similar to others i.e. music Videos - The B-52ās - Rock Lobster; All music video files listed within the same artist folder should stay togther.
- A simple, functional sort by artist that would group all music videos from the same artist together in alpha sequence.
These seem like small simple fixes that would at least tide over until a good data source / agent becomes available.
