Plex Blog

November 14, 2008

Plex/Seven: Background Music and TV Themes

These new features, cleverly conjured up by James, add some welcome pizzazz to the Plex experience.

The first allows you to put some tracks into ~/Library/Application Support/Plex/Background Music/Main/ which are played while you are browsing around Plex. It’s a great way to personalize the media center to your taste. Personally, I think I’ll put some Zero 7 in there, or maybe some School of Seven Bells (great album, by the way). You can use MP3 files, or even DRM iTunes AAC tracks. Please feel free to leave a comment telling us what tracks you think would make great background music as I’m curious to hear your picks.

I really love this next feature. When I first showed Anna, she said “That’s f—ing cool”, and she’s not prone to swearing. Essentially, we’ve compiled (thanks to James and many contributors on the forums) a collection of high quality TV theme music samples (30 seconds or less, for reasons of copyright) and stored them on the Plex servers. When you scrape your TV shows, besides downloading metadata, Plex queries our server and if available, will download the theme music. The next time you browse into a TV show, the theme music will play. It’s really hard to explain how cool this is until you see and hear it. Once you browse into Lost, for example, and the ethereal theme for the show starts playing, you’ll see how the music coupled with the fan art really provides a more complete experience for the senses.

If you’d like to contribute to the growing collection of theme music, send the files (MP3, preferably, limited to 30 seconds, no need to fade in or out as that’s done in the code) to [email protected]. Please include the TVDB ID for the show.

Someone in the last post commented on how Barkley looked a little too clean cut, so I’ll post this photo for comparison. That’s him opening up a can of tennis ball whoop-ass on his friend Manu. I think he gets NBC with his ears pointed like that.

40D-1698.jpg

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