Music and Emby Shenanigans!!

[Apotropaic 75]

Had Emby for a long time now but I never ventured into using it for music. At some point I had an iPod so ripped my music to that, then went onto Google Music and with kids I subscribed to YouTube Premium.

Streaming has been my only way to consume music so I let my cassette and CD players bite the dust and not replace them. I now have smart/castable speakers all around the house and it all works fine, except my days of music discovery has gone, I don’t even track if my favourite artists have created any new music since 2015…I switch between 2/3 playlists and occasionally I hear something new on tv.

I’ve been avoiding work and suddenly got inspired to see what a music library on Emby looks like. Imported a few of my albums, found some obscure dts and flac tracks I had but had never the hardware to play them before. Amazed that everything just worked, and on devices that can’t Emby transcoded the audio files. Not sure why I was so surprised at Emby for doing this but I had never thought about it!

I’m now on a journey of ripping to flac and rediscovering the joy of albums (Baby D - Deliverance  ).

Never really listened to lossless flac and still trying to work out if they sound better than my old mp3 and streamed YouTube music. I think I can but not sure if it’s the excitement I’m hearing. A/B/C comparisons are tricky to do, that’s probably my next rabbit hole I venture down into.

Oh and for anyone else who uses Emby for music, are there any visualisations possible, even a music card or a moving slideshow?

All I’m getting is the static album cover and the playback controls, after a while my Emby screensaver kicks in and starts showing my movie posters…

[Luke 42556]

Quote

moving slideshow

Hi, what would you want in the slideshow?

[TMCsw 275]

22 hours ago, Apotropaic said:

Oh and for anyone else who uses Emby for music, are there any visualisations possible

if you have .lrc files beside the music files you can enable lyrics.

[Apotropaic 75]

4 hours ago, Luke said:

Hi, what would you want in the slideshow?

I started this reply but then realised I was guessing too much so I’ve gone through my setup again…but I still may not have this setup correctly.

I’ve noticed if I have multiple artist art backgrounds then these cycle through on my android app nicely when I’m in the album view. They cycle regardless if I’m playing something or not. This is a plus!

However, when I go to the player control view (which isn’t intuitive at all) there is no background at all. I can see the album art and the background seems to be colour matched with a gradient effect which is a nice effect but it is static.

A nice option would be to do what YouTube Music does which is to take the album art and it applies a moving magnified view, with some filtering applied so it’s well blended. That way it appears the background behind the player controls are animated slowly but are colour matched for the album art.

An advanced option if I’m greedy is some sort of graphical visualisation synced to the track, milkdrop etc. There are feature requests for this already.

[Apotropaic 75]

1 hour ago, TMCsw said:

if you have .lrc files beside the music files you can enable lyrics.

Interesting, I’d really like that so I’ll look into it, thanks!!  

[user24 387]

On 5/21/2026 at 8:22 AM, Apotropaic said:

Oh and for anyone else who uses Emby for music, are there any visualisations possible, even a music card or a moving slideshow?

Hi, yeah Emby can be great for music! While there are always ongoing improvements that can be made, I think it's underestimated and overlooked by many. Anyway, your post/comments made me remember something from long ago...

Around the time when Windows Media Center (WMC) was around, Windows also had a Zune platform in operation (including physical players and even an online store). I tried out the desktop version at the time and quite liked the album wall backgrounds that were generated.

There's not many images to find online now, and of course I don't have that old PC running it anymore. But, as a fun weekend project I've been trying to somewhat replicate it with Emby (perhaps out-of-fashion and too digital-retro - but interesting to me anyway)...

Here's a static screenshot I found as a starting point:

Here's my first Emby attempt (same album):

I've managed to get this creating a random background of Albums by the Album Artist each time a new song plays. It runs for about 10sec. at the start of each song and then stays fixed. Here's a short video, rather than a much longer explanation:

On 5/22/2026 at 3:20 AM, Luke said:

Hi, what would you want in the slideshow?

My general idea (as per above video) would be to have a random Album art background relating to the Artist. Perhaps it could be an extra option to the existing Backdrop and Primary Image Blur choices?

Beyond my first go at this, there's a lot more I still want to experiment with to get it looking and working better... Cheers!

[Gilgamesh_48 1251]

I "see" no point to any kind of visualizations for music. I listen to and watch TV shows and movies but I listen to music. If I am listening to music I do not need or want visuals messing up the experience. 
But I do not use Emby for music or audio books as I find it inferior to apps like MediaMonkey that play the audio and stay out of the way otherwise. 
I guess some will think that I should not post in threads like this but I often cannot resist as I wish Emby would NOT even try to be "One app to rule them all" as I think that including a TV in an audio stream is just foolish. I take it further as I do not even use the same hardware for audio as I do for TV and movies but that is, most probably, overkill in the other direction. 

I find it best to use hardware and software that best fits the use case. So for TV and Movies I use Emby running on a decent PC server and I use MediaMonkey running on a cheap mini PC for all my audio needs. In my setup I can pause a video get up to do things in my house while listening to an audio book or music and then return to exactly where I was in my video. All with exactly two keypresses or even less as my MediaMonkey setup is voice controlled. and the sound for MediaMonkey is piped to the whole house and I can use a single command to start and stop audio from anywhere in my house and the audio from my video library does not need to be piped to the whole house. I present that as an alternative to using Emby for audio. It is neither better or worse than just using Emby for everything but, for me, it is a lot easier and more flexible.

[Apotropaic 75]

@user24I really like what you’ve done, it’s an interesting take on using artist/album art and creating a mosaic from it, it does inject some ‘life’ into it, so well done!

I can’t even remember half of the audio players I’ve used over the years. I can just about remember Winamp from the 90’s

So many had cool little effects and visualisations that are largely lost to time now.

@Gilgamesh_48- I for one have no issue with you posting in any thread to add your own views and experience.

I do get where you are coming from, I have the similar view when friends and families talk about their tv setups and I wonder why they are bothering to watch movies at all if they aren’t going to go all in with home cinema…

I guess we all have our own way of listening to music, I pay for a streaming service so I have my playlists and songs to stream all over the house and in the car. I’m happy with it all, whether it’s background or active listening.

I’ve even had a dedicated music amp and floor standers just for music, which I’ve dismantled and have stored in my loft for now since my amp died.

My interest in listening to music through Emby started out as just an experiment. But now it’s more of an experience to replace watching video, discovering old albums I used to love and also playing around with lossless audio. So it’s an active experience for me, plus my screen is 120’’ so it’s hard to miss even if I’m scrolling on my phone but either way I’m sat down and facing the screen.

I do agree if I was into this purely from the audiophile side then yes visualisations and the use of a screen is secondary if not redundant.

[arrbee99 1842]

Am sure I should read this thread properly, but it was mentioned that there's no backdrop in the player control view. I get images and it cycles between them, but thats in Firefox (and I guess any browser)

[Apotropaic 75]

33 minutes ago, arrbee99 said:

Am sure I should read this thread properly, but it was mentioned that there's no backdrop in the player control view. I get images and it cycles between them, but thats in Firefox (and I guess any browser)

Interesting, I just checked playing something in edge on an iPhone. If I select a track from an album and its stays on that album view then yes it does cycle thought background art.

I’m unsure of the exact mechanics but if you select the track again at the bottom where there is a mini icon and track name, then it’s goes into another Player view where you don’t see the album view anymore, just the single track that is playing. This background doesn’t change for me.