Ah, I stand corrected. You’ve made this silly decision on all your client apps, then. Bravo.
I wasn’t complaining about consistency. My point was Plex made a big deal of bringing all clients together under one UI you were happy with, so why change it? Again, what has this change actually improved?
OK, so reverting back to the way it was hopefully…?
I’ve no idea what that means but it sounds like you’ve decided users don’t actually want to see all the albums under an artist without having to click another button or toggle another setting in a menu somewhere. It really was fine the way it was.
Lots of feedback in here, thanks everyone for taking the time. I’ll make sure it’s all put in front of the designers and bugs are noted and fixed.
Not sure what was ambiguous about my statement, sorry for not being clear. We will show a number of Albums in a grid instead of the horizontal list, and if there is a lot of them (I think 12?) the rest will be accessible by clicking the “See All” button.
Why give us some arbitrary number in a grid? If I go into an artist I want to see all of their albums. Period. Believe it or not, I don’t go into an artist to read the Wikipedia page Plex has scraped from the web or to see which other artists are related to the artists or to see if they are on tour or…you get the idea. Pretty much the only reason I go into an artist is to see their list of albums.
If nothing else, at least give us a setting to make this arbitrary number “show all” by default.
Since you’re accepting gripes, I have one more to add. I have multiple FLAC albums with different titles/mastering. Plex used to display each one under Recently Added Music but now it no longer does. It assumes an added album already exists and just ignores others that it thinks are the same. Maybe an example will help:
These names are both the titles in the ID3 tags and the directory names in storage. They have different album covers. The first is a 20-bit mastering while the second is 16-bit. For all practical purposes, they are two distinct recordings and Plex used to treat them as such for Recently Added Music.
Plex now assumes both of these are the same album and ignores all but one of them under Recently Added Music. This occurs on the server and apps. The similar album(s) are in the libraries and accessible; they just don’t appear under Recently Added Music anymore. When I now add another version to the library my users won’t see it as a new album added. Grrrr…
I don’t have a Show All on iOS. I have to tap the word Albums to get to grid view. Better than not at all, I suppose. I have to tell every user what to do. A simple ‘Albums >’ would make it obvious to even my morons.
It would also be nice to have a grid view option for Recently Added… too. I frequently add 50+ albums in a single sitting. Sometimes, I might even do that several times per day.
have you tried to unmatch it first? If you select both and unmatched them, they should appear with the original metadata attached and show as separate albums (again?).
I never had to do that before. They do show as separate albums in the libraries – just not under Recently Added Music. Only the first album added shows up there. All others are ignored. Wasn’t that way before the last server update.
I unmatched one and got this mess. I’m not even using the Disc field of the tag, either. It’s a single disc album. Maybe I need to add the Disc field in the ID3 tag and set it to 1, even if it’s redundant, so as not to confuse Plex?
Update: You were correct but, like I said, I never had to Unmatch before. After manually fixing this mess both now show up under Recently Added Music. That’s too damn much work for something I never had to mess with at all before.
Well, currently on Android we don’t have a “Show All” or the ability to tap “Albums” to see a grid view. I believe they somehow forgot to add this feature for Android so we can only horizontally scroll. As you point out, even the iOS feature is very hidden and unintuitive, so perhaps that’s why they are proposing “Show All”, but this still makes it a two-step process for something that is a primary reason you look at artists in the first place.
Wow @smithmedialibrary, I thought I had it bad viewing my collection and I don’t even collect different masterings and versions of albums, I just try to be complete for each artist I have. I’d love to see your collection.
I think the average Plex developer doesn’t understand the amount of effort people put into curating their media collections, which is why they end up making decisions like this that hamper browsing our collections.
Hopefully the same will be done for videos as well. Collections on mobile (Android to be more precise) are almost useless now since they could potentially have dozens of videos leading to endless side-scrolling which is not only uncomfortable but unintuitive from an app usage standpoint. Thank you for listing to our feedback on this pressing issue.
I’ve divided my Plex server into three major library sections (below) for audio. Many FLAC albums are audiophile MFSL/DCC/AFZ/K2/HDCD/SHM/SMS/SBM, etc. I have different editions of many albums so it doesn’t make sense to count albums.
MP3 (crapola)
FLAC (16/20-bit) CD
FLACHD (24-bit) DVD/BD
I also have 5.1 Surround & DTS ISO’s but Plex can’t play those.
Finally updated. I stand by my original request to see all albums by default, but I’d also like to request to bring back showing the release year of the album in the album thumbnail.
In the latest release, even with the “show all” option, if you want to find the latest release of an artist you need to drill down into each album too see when it was released. This was handled so much nicer before.
Version 8.3.0.18912 only shows 12 albums for an artist on my phone, if there are more albums than that you have to click “show all” to see all of them. This is better than only offering horizontal scrolling, but still isn’t as good as before where you could see them all without extra effort. Further, for me, it is worse because it no longer shows the release year of the album unless you drill down into the album.
I don’t use the music section much but decided to go and have a look, and I can actually see why they would add the see all, there is a lot of other info the artist page gives, popular tracks, music videos, touring status and similar artists.
As the see all is at the top of the list and not as the bottom I can see the design decision that lead to this.
I can see where they might have gotten the inspiration for this. It’s in the Apple Music app on iOS and Apple Music makes you scroll horizontal, still a bad design. Spotify doesn’t even have albums listed but rather a See Discography button, which is the same as See All in Plex. But if Plex wants to shine and be the all around better music player I think it’s best to show all the albums. We curated this after all, it’s our music library. I don’t think we need to have extra clicks for this.
I’m sure that was their thinking, yes, but all of that other information is stuff that Plex adds to be “helpful”, but these design choices simply make it harder for us to get to our actual media collection, which is generally what we want to see. I’m pretty sure that only a handful of people actually drill down into an artist in Plex to see their tour dates.
I’m not against having this “helpful” information, but I am against having it be prioritized over our actual media collections, which is exactly what is happening in this case.
The Plex team does this a little better for the “Music” library page, for example. There if you want to see the “helpful” information, you can view the “recommended” tab, but if you just want to see your media collection you select the “library” tab. Plex will remember your last selection in this case, so you always get what you want.
They could do something similar for the “Artist” page and simply allow us to choose “recommended” or “library”, then people are free to choose whichever view works for them.
