I’ve been using Plex and Plexamp for the past few months and it’s been a bit bumpy - had to make a lot of changes to the metadata on my music collection to get things to work just right. I’m cool with that. Figured there’d be some growing pains to get things setup.
However, that is right up until I want to see the albums in my collection. When I navigate into my library and select the “Album” tab, the contents of that collection are then further subdivided by artist. I have a lot of collaborative albums with multiple artists (EG: artist A for track 1 and Artist B for track 2, etc…) where this kind of sorting feels very unintuitive. I get two entries in the album listings, neither of which contain the full track listing for that album. If I want to listen to single whole album, I have to typically go find the album in my folder structure on the server., which doesn’t feel great on mobile or desktop.
I could go through and retag all my music to make this sorting work, but I’m not even really sure what metadata to rewrite to make albums group better (strictly by album name - no separation by artist). I feel like I might lose out on other features if I have to homogenize the artist tags though… Is there any recommendations for setting the song metadata more appropriately to achieve this? Alternatively, is it possible for Plex to consider changing how this sorting works?
Plex has no support for collaboration albums. You will have to decide on one artist for a certain album, to act as an “Album Artist” of that album. (Keep in mind that regular [track] Artists can still be different within an album.)
You need to tag your files accordingly. The AlbumArtist meta tag is very important for Plex. It will ensure that an album is not split into two, if some tracks are by one artist and some by a different artist.
This is a typical case:
meta tags: (notice how there are separate “Artist” and “Album Artist” tags, with the Album Artist being identical in all tracks)
Which will then look like this in Plex. The album appears under “Trevor Horn”, because that is the Album Artist, even though he collaborated on pretty much every track with a different artist:
Ahhhhh, I see what you mean here. Suppose the short answer is I need to go and get all my metadata squared up for the Album-Artist tag and things will sort themselves out. Shouldn’t have to modify my Artist tag, which is helpful. Thank you for the information.
Back to the tagging abyss for me then! Shouldn’t be too bad though.
Make sure that the “Album Artist” is identical to the Artist folder where the album is stored within.
If you have “Prefer local metadata” activated, you better make sure that there are no albums with differing Album Artist stored inside the same Artist folder.
Made the updates and it looks like everything is just about right! There’s an album comprised of .WAV files and it appears to ignore the album artist tag, but I suppose that might be more the .WAV format being touchy.
