Plex for music: Show codecs on the cover

 

Plex is a great personal streaming service when you use plexamp. Especially if you are using lossless flacs, it can easily replace spotify. However, you soon realize that plex has been created with movies and not music in the minds. I played around with plex in recent months and like to share my experiences with plex and some third party tools which can be a great help to improve listening experience even further. 

 

 A word concerning my setup: I use plex on a Synology Nas with an ARM-Processor, so no Docker Installation, no Supersonic functionality on plexamp. At home, I use a Windows Machine to access the plex installation via web. Same applies when using an ipad, either I listen to music, then I use plexamp or I fiddle around, then I access via web. The Ios app of plex just works fine for playing movies (which I don't use much). 

Show codecs on the cover 

 For starters, plex doesn't care about the codec as it can easily convert high bitrates into bitrates fit for streaming. But if you have started to rip your CDs years ago, it is likely you have started with mp3 rips and turned to flac in later times. Is there an easy way to see whether you have a lossless version of your album or even have encoded once in mp3-quality and later on in lossless quality? First of all, you should add "flac" to all album titles with flac rips. I used Mediamonkey for that and let plex scan my library again. If you want to have a nice cover with a codec ribbon like that

you can use the awesome plex media manager for that. Go to https://metamanager.wiki/en/latest/ where the installation process is explained in detail. As of 11/22, applying an overlay to album covers would give you distorted images if you use the master version of PMM. However, if you use the nightly, that has been corrected. You need to write your own "overlay-music.yml", but if I could do it, you can as well.