My wife and I have all our digital music in a single Plex library. When we play all our “jazz” tracks, we want Plex to play all of her tracks as well as mine which belong to that genre. This works fine.
However, we still want the ability to visually browse (i.e. with album art) our own album collections while having the spouses albums filtered out (we have a LOT of albums). This seems like it should be simple, but so far my attempts have proven futile.
How can I do this?
First attempt
Music/
My-Albums/
- / -
…
Her-Albums/
- / -
…
The above represents the file and folder structure I use and it reflects Plex’s recommendations. I initially expected that this folder structure would make it very simple to view our albums separately, and although that’s technically possible (by switching to the “folders” view), Plex apparently can’t show the corresponding album art, despite each folder containing a “folder.jpg” image.
Second attempt
I briefly thought about splitting our albums into two libraries (her library and my library), but then I couldn’t achieve the first goal of having Plex play music from a specific genre across both our music collections.
Third attempt
I started looking into collections, hoping to create one collection containing her albums and one containing mine, but nope, for the life of me I can’t figure out how to create these.
The PMS web interface doesn’t allow me to create collections of music albums at all (works fine for movies). On the Android tablet I’m testing with I can see collections being offered as a filtering mechanism (which is why I assume it should theoretically work), but I see no way of defining collections using the Android app itself.
I’m sure there must be some way to achieve my goal, but what is it?
I’m using the most current version of all Plex software at the time of writing:
You can also use Labels in pretty much the same way you would use Collections.
If you add the label “Mary” to all of your wife’s albums, and “Joe” to all of your albums, you will be able to do what you describe. Of course, you will have to change your name to Joe, and your wife will have to change her name to Mary, but …
In your app, on the same menu where ‘Collections’ appears, there should now be a ‘Labels’ item.
Okay, changed our names to Joe and Mary, now what?
Thanks to both of you for your help! The labels did the trick.
@trumpy81
What you suggest would technically have solved my problem too, so you’re absolutely right. I’m afraid it’s just not very maintainable. I forgot to mention that we have thousands of albums and I maintain a few dozen genres. If I decide to split up a genre into two sub genres I’d end up recreating all those playlists, which just isn’t feasible. That’s far too error prone, and too much work, at least in my situation.
@beckfield said:
You can also use Labels in pretty much the same way you would use Collections.
Thanks for this! I saw the feature but in my mind, ‘Labels’ is “Record Labels” and that wasn’t what I wanted.
So, Plex developers, if Labels does the same thing that Collections does why not just call it ‘Collections’?
EDIT: Labels is under ‘Sharing’ which isn’t the same; I want to be able to tag a group of items in music without polluting the ‘Genre’ tags. Is that really that difficult to do?
Okay, I’m back to square one. I’m summarizing the situation as I currently understand it for others who may be new to this.
A label and a collection are different things.
A collection is a set of items. They are intended to be used as a filtering mechanism. For example, I can define a collection that contains all my James Bond films. Once that’s done, selecting it will hide (filter out) all the movies except those belonging to the James Bond collection. Properties:
Collections can be defined only for video content (unavailable for Music or Pictures).
Once defined, a collection is available to any user, i.e. any user can apply it as a filter.
A label is also a set of items. However, they are intended to be used as an access control mechanism (“label” is a terrible term for this sort of thing). For example, I can tag all my kid-friendly movies with the same label, and then specify that a young user’s choice of movies should be restricted to those with that label. Properties:
Labels are available for all media content
Labels are only available to the server administrator. So, an administrator can use a label as a filtering mechanism, but nobody else.
Unfortunately, I didn’t test the label filtering mechanism with another user until recently. For my wife (she is a separate user) this has now become entirely useless. So, I’m back to asking why collections are not enabled for music albums?
Please Plex. Make your music management worthwhile! Allow for ALBUM COLLECTIONS and allow us to filter TRACKS by GENRE (filtering albums by genre, as it works now, makes no sense whatsoever). It’s hard to take Plex seriously as a media management package if it can’t do those things.
Decided to cancel my Plex Pass. I really tried hard to make it work, but I can’t do it anymore. Too many issues and little niggles, particularly for a paid product.
