In music libraries, I can’t search for tracks by a specific artist if those tracks belong to an album with a different album artist. For example, I have a large collection of video game remix albums from OverClocked ReMix. These albums often feature a different artist for every track. I’d like to be able to do a search for all tracks in my library by say, zircon, regardless of whether or not the track is part of one of his own albums or part of one of these multi-artist compilation albums.
I poked around a bit and couldn’t seem to figure out how to do this.
if I do a search for zircon in the Artists view, I’ll get a list of albums where he’s the Album Artist.
If I do a search for zircon in the Tracks view, I’ll get a list of tracks where “zircon” is in the title of the track.
if i do a search for zircon in the Albums view, I’ll get a list of albums where “zircon” is in the title of the album.
Right now there’s no way for me to just get all tracks in my library by a specific artist.
I’d like to request an “artist” filter be added to the Track view that returns tracks by a specific artist and completely ignores the Album Artist field when conducting the search.
If this is something that already exists, then please show me how to do it. If it doesn’t exist, then I think it would be a feature worth adding.
@chrisallen said:
Unfortunately searching for an artist within a compilation (Various Artists) album is not yet supported. It is however, something we are aware of and it’ll be supported in an upcoming release.
I’ve been monitoring all release notes, and diligently updating and testing each new version, hoping that this would be fixed in each upcoming release, but no luck as yet.
I really want to use Plex to make playlists and I have lots of compilation albums, but without a fully functioning search, it’s frustrating!
@DarkeSword said:
In music libraries, I can’t search for tracks by a specific artist if those tracks belong to an album with a different album artist. For example, I have a large collection of video game remix albums from OverClocked ReMix. These albums often feature a different artist for every track. I’d like to be able to do a search for all tracks in my library by say, zircon, regardless of whether or not the track is part of one of his own albums or part of one of these multi-artist compilation albums.
I poked around a bit and couldn’t seem to figure out how to do this.
if I do a search for zircon in the Artists view, I’ll get a list of albums where he’s the Album Artist.
If I do a search for zircon in the Tracks view, I’ll get a list of tracks where “zircon” is in the title of the track.
if i do a search for zircon in the Albums view, I’ll get a list of albums where “zircon” is in the title of the album.
Right now there’s no way for me to just get all tracks in my library by a specific artist.
I’d like to request an “artist” filter be added to the Track view that returns tracks by a specific artist and completely ignores the Album Artist field when conducting the search.
If this is something that already exists, then please show me how to do it. If it doesn’t exist, then I think it would be a feature worth adding.
Thank you.
Bum, I should have searched more diligently; I made a similar post myself. Sonos deals with this issue well. You should make this into a ‘Feature request’.
@chrisallen said:
Unfortunately searching for an artist within a compilation (Various Artists) album is not yet supported. It is however, something we are aware of and it’ll be supported in an upcoming release.
So I do not see the point in voting for something they have already said will be implemented.
@MovieFan.Plex said:
Digging further into this issue, it might not actually be a bug. It is a bug, but only because it’s not intended to work that way.
Right now searching for an artist will just return the 1 entry for that artist. So the criteria for the smart playlist is artist=“search criteria”. So the result is correct. You cannot specify other parameters so the list is just random.
Since this result will just be 1 artist, there is no need to generate a smart playlist for the artist. You can just hit play at the artist level, which will play all track in order sorted by the album, which is exactly what you were trying to accomplish with the smart playlist. Any albums you add will also get included. If/When the search is changed to return the individual tracks based on artist, I’m sure the sorting can be worked out properly then.
@DarkeSword said:
I’m glad this is something Plex is aware of and working on implementing.
I nearly thought they had implemented this in the Plex Media Server 0.9.14.0 released today; I fast forward read: “Get all genres for album and artist from tracks.”
Hi Guys,
Seems this still isn’t working the plex library interprets “Album Artist” as the artist. This certainly doesn’t work on compilation albums or VA albums. Is this being looked at? would expect this would be a simple fix. Is this something plex is looking at?
Confirmed: still not working … only workaround is to sort by artist and scroll down to whatever artist you are looking for to see the tracks grouped somewhere … huge library = huge pain.
Hi, thanks for your post, I completely agree that this problem with the ‘various artists’ albums should be fixed so that it would be possible to search for all tracks from a specific artist.
However, related to that problem is another one - which maybe has the same root cause - which is that if you search for an artist you only get the albums from that artist alone, not the ones that are collaborations or multiple artists albums.
For example, if I search ‘Tony Bennett’ it gives me only the albums from him on his own as ‘album artist’, but none of the others he did with other people (eg. Tony Bennett & Bill Evans).
This is wrong, and gives wrong results about the albums you have from each artist.
Plus, I just noticed: If you go to an artist page, not even in the “suggested or similar artists” do the other records with collaborations appear…
Is this going to be solved soon?
Thank you for your support.
That’s what I need - songs that are within compilations to still show up on the artist’s page - and be able to search for the actual artist rather than “various artists”, for example.
a bug in the new “Plex Music” scanner that populates the database, it will now not read the track artist fields for compilations without an album artist (that should be an easy fix and hopefully this is done soon)
a bug (or design flaw, if you are kind) in the search/query part of Plex: it only searches across album artists, not track artists. This is a bit more complex since I imagine any changes will have implications downstream with all the players.
I have scanned around the feature requests and have found several referring to this feature request dating back to 2010. So many people have sent this desire out to the Plex gods. Ten years later, I still wish there were some hope to see this thing that most other media managers can well handle. I have lots of compilations. It would be a dream this coming decade to finally see all the compilation tracks from, say, ZZTop show up under ZZTop when I visit the artist page. The metadata for track artist is ready and waiting to be exploited.
I’d even join a group of folks willing to go on special assessment payments to make this happen.
Yeah I have about 3,000 compilation albums in my library, but the artists are not searchable. Clearly the Plex devs do not have many compilations in their personal music libraries, else they’d have fixed it years ago - it’s super annoying. The metadata is already in the Plex db, it’s just not used. A simple SELECT […] WHERE EXISTS query across two columns instead of one, it shouldn’t be rocket science you’d think.
I’ve actually flagged this with the Prism developer on reddit, maybe he can add track artist search/filter to his app (which is fantastic btw, everybody buy it)
