3 artists with the same name; only 1 is in MusicBrainz... How to set up metadata?

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
1

I’ve come across a music metadata issue I don’t know how to solve.

There are 3 bands named “Red 7,” each in a different genre. My first thought was to use the Musicbrainz artists tags to specify who’s who… But only one Red 7 is in Musicbrainz.

All are listed at Discogs so at least I can show I am not crazy.

Red 7: Soft Rock/Synthpop

Red 7 (2): EBM

Red 7 (3): House

In my music library, the artist directories are Red 7, Red 7 (2), and Red 7 (3) – I use the Discogs artist name format, so I can keep it straight when I look at the filesystem. The Album Artist tags are all Red 7 though, and in Plex all albums are grouped under the one Red 7 that is known to Musicbrainz. No surprise, I guess.

Without modifying data at Musicbrainz, how can I tag these albums so that they show up as separate artists with the same name? Is that even possible?

2

It isn’t.
There must be some thing to differentiate the artists from each other.
If there are no Musicbrainz records, then you’ll have to resort to adding a suffix to the artist name and activate “Prefer local metadata”.

You should do the latter only if all metadata in your files are complete and correct (and are not contradictory to the folder structure where the files are in).

3

I’m already on Prefer Local Metadata so I guess I will do it that way. It’s too bad because I don’t want to adulterate the band name, but so it goes.

(I did try adding a fake Musicbrainz artist ID – I thought just maybe that would get Plex to break things up into multiple artists even if it could not look anything up – but it didn’t work as I hoped.)

4

How about adding a real record for each of those artists to Musicbrainz?

5

I may do that, it’s just a new can of worms and I wanted a quick result.

6

I made time and added one new Red 7 artist to Musicbrainz. The process is pretty easy. Because it was a new artist and release nothing appeared to be held for review except the cover art.

However, despite a Plex Dance and the use of Musicbrainz tags for Album Artist and Release Group, Plex is still combining the two Red 7 artists from MusicBrainz into one Plex artist.

Maybe there’s a delay in propagating new data from Musicbrainz to some Plex cached copy, I don’t know.

7

There definitely is. Allow 24-48 hours for new entries to get available – if they’re immediately accepted by Musicbrainz. If they have to pass the peer review first, it is an additional week waiting time.

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8

To tell the end of the story, after a couple of days the data was available at Musicbrainz, and a rescan broke the artists up as I had hoped.

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