Not see anyone else suggest this.
When I search for music by artist currently it will not give any results from compilations. would it be possible to have plex use the album artist for the albums view but use the actual artist for other purposes such as searches or viewing artists?
Oddly enough, I don't think Plex even scans the Artist into the database. It appears nowhere, only Album Artist is shown. Basic functionality they should have hashed out years ago.
I for one would love to see the fixed.
8,000 tracks of my music collection is on compilation albums but do not show up on artist search's - frustrating to say the least!
Yes please!
I for one would love to see the fixed.
8,000 tracks of my music collection is on compilation albums but do not show up on artist search's - frustrating to say the least!
Yes! I don't have as many compilation tracks as you, but I have enough that I would like to see this as well.
+1 Vote for this "feature"Â
for me its a bug, that you can not search by id3-tags.
+1 vote on this from me too
@ishirley said:
Not see anyone else suggest this.When I search for music by artist currently it will not give any results from compilations. would it be possible to have plex use the album artist for the albums view but use the actual artist for other purposes such as searches or viewing artists?
I made a similar post myself and DarkeSword also has issue as well as Daveinc here. Sonos deals with this issue well.
There was an answer from Plex in Daveincâs post, but that was back in April (20th):
@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 itâll be supported in an upcoming release.
I use plex for movies since years and happy with it.
I also made some tests with MP3s after the big improvement notice some month ago.
But with no display of own mp3 artwork for each song from inside mp3 Tag (in compilations) and also no song artist use instead of album artist use it is useless for me 
I see the more like a bug with big impact. Please improve it.
arranging/filtering music by Track Artist is far more valuable to me (in most contexts) than by Album Artist. Not that I donât appreciate having the album artist option, I just find it more useful to be able to have music arranged by track artists - with perhaps all the albums in which they appear within that folder, much how arranging by album artist currently functions.
btw, if I understood them correctly, some forum comments suggest that the âcomposerâ tag would fill the function of track artist. I donât believe they would. Comparing track artists and composers are like apples and oranges, performers and writers. Arranging by composer is valuable in itâs own right.
In April of last year, @chrisallen stated that this would be in âan upcoming release.â
VERY disappointed that the new redesign of Search still doesnât do this.
Not sure if this is related, but it is quite annoying on Android, PS3, PS4 & Chromecast clients that the album artist value is used rather then the artist value. For compilation albums where album artist is set to âVarious Artistâ, this means there is no way of seeing the actual artist apart from going to the media server PC and looking at it there, as it displays correctly in the browser.
@beckfield said:
In April of last year, @chrisallen stated that this would be in âan upcoming release.âVERY disappointed that the new redesign of Search still doesnât do this.
So I guess the new design does search the track artist, but tracks from compilation albums are listed under Tracks in the search results, rather than Artist.
Hi,
+1 Vote for this âfeatureâ
Please repair the âbugâ
Thanks!
I bought a plex pass almost entirely to upvote this.
I cannot fathom why it doesnât already work. This should be fairly trivial code in the search logic to extend the search and pick up.
I also would like to see some more search functionality for these fields. In reading the various posts, its clear that this would be a big fix because of the number of fields. One user might not want to search âcomposerâ, but another would. For example: which songs did J.J. Cale write in the Clapton Library? We might be stuck in the long tail of users if most are just using the product to just blast out the latest pop.
Workaround: Its labor intensive, but one could edit the âAlbum Artistâ field to contain the artist for that track. That will produce a search result for the artist. The caveat is that the unfiltered artist sort list gets crowded. Also, after I make a change like this, I have to move the folder that contains the track in order for the library scan to pick it up, or manually change it in plex as well. Seems to be a bug in scan.
Hi Guys,
Seems this still isnât working the plex library interprets âAlbum Artistâ as the artist. This certainly doesnât work on compilation albums or VA albums. Is this being looked at? would expect this would be a simple fix.
Plex and compilation albums is a sadly neglected combination. It appears as if the developers/testers donât have any compilation albums (as in, albums with tracks by different artists, from different years or from different genres) in their libraries themselves so it never gets considered as an oversight or gets tested.
The various issues have been documented for years. Some of them would require changes to the scanner (for example, populating the database with year and genre by track, support for reading the Compilation id3 frame), some of them need changes to the client-side UI or the sql queries into the database (eg, make search work across album artist and track artists, display a year range for albums with tracks from different years, be able to filter tracks by genre and not just whole albums, etc).
None of them are super easy fixes but youâd hope that eventually they would get fixed.
1 Like
100% agree. Very basic. I would be fine if an âArtistâ search grabs both album artist andâŠthe actual Artist tag⊠please 
