I wanna move to jellyfin somewhere next year because of Plex’s user-unfriendly practices, but I haven’t yet. It good to hear from @TunaLobster@lemmy.world that improvements are coming.

Here’s what I did for my podcasts in Plex that might just work for Jellyfin too:

I created a separate music library for my podcasts, and checked the settings for remember play positions and prefer local metadata. (This is probably all plex specific)

I then edited each mp3 file to contain the following metadata:

• the podcast name as “Artist”
• the category of episodes as album
• the season of the episode as disc number
• the episode number as track number
• the episode title as track title

I’ll give some examples:

The Delta Flyers is a podcast that discusses episodes about Star Trek Voyager and Star Trek Deep Space 9. This episode discusses the third Voyager episode of season two, Projections.

• Artist: The Delta Flyers
• Album: Voyager
• Disc: 2
• Track: 3
• Title: [2020-08-31] S2E03: Projections

TrashFuture is a comedy podcast about politics, technology and the future. It has mostly regular episodes, but some fall into a specific category.

This is an episode in the category Britainology that discusses specific moments in British culture.

• Episode title: Britainology 79: UK Garage feat. Dan Hancox
• Artist: TrashFuture
• Album: Britainology
• Disc: 2024
• Track: 79
• Title: UK Garage feat. Dan Hancox

This is a regular episode from sept 11th of 2023 that discusses bad construction in the UK:

• Episode Title: RAAC City feat. Well There’s Your Problem
• Artist: TrashFuture
• Album: TrashFuture
• Disc: 2023
• Track: 0911
• Title: [2023-09-11] RAAC City feat. Well There’s Your Problem

For a weekly podcast this is around 50 episodes per disc. If you have a daily show, you might want to use “disc: 202309 track: 11” instead, and/or split each year into a separate album. E.g. Album “TrashFuture 2023” Disc: 09 Track: 11.

I hope this gives you some inspiration in how you can manage your radio shows.

As others have said, Jellyfin is not the correct tool for this job right now. One of the things that should come out as a result of the EFCore database migration is new library types. One of those being podcasts. The old database made it incredibly difficult to add a new media type so that roadblock is gone now. So possibly soon™.

I would treat these like podcasts and use ABS to play them. Or any other podcast app. Keep in mind that ABS is heavily geared towards audiobooks and the web interface. Everything outside of that (native apps and podcasts) is not a major priority for new features from the current set of devs. Which isn't a bad thing! Podcasts plenty well enough to be useful.

I normally love opinionated software, but Jellyfin's options often just kind of suck.

It would be nice to have an option to mark a folder as "Just list these in alphanumeric order, and play them when I click on them".

But I'm not aware of such an option.

You might need something like AudioBookShelf for these to play them properly.