Currently, Plex is basically limited so that every album and track has one and only one artist. A ton of songs have more than one artist, and currently, there’s no good way to represent this in Plex. You could set the artist to something like “ArtistA and ArtistB”, but then that track/album will show up as a new artist, and it won’t show up under “ArtistA” or “ArtistB”. This is inconvenient and annoying.
Instead of the “artist” field just being a text box, what if it were a “tags” box, where you could type in as many artists as you want? That way, you could have a track linked to ArtistA and ArtistB, and it would show up automatically in both places. This is precisely what Spotify does, as you can see on this album that has lots of different artists.
Obviously, the major barrier to implementing this feature is that Gracenote and other data providers do not have artists split up this way, so any metadata imported from those sources won’t be correct. You could either try to intelligently detect words like “featuring” in the names of artists to correct the data from Gracenote, or you could simply leave it to the end users to manually fix the metadata if they want to.
I second this! I’ve been wanting a better way to organize my music for years and no program I’ve found has been able to do it properly. I hope Plex will, eventually.
The ID3v2.3 spec specifies that the Artist field may contain multiple artists, separated by a slash “/” character. The same is true for other fields, such as Composer. I’m hoping that broader support for these tags will eventually make it into Plex.
I would certainly like this. I’ve got a lot of old flamenco records (and compilations) and I want both the singer and guitarrist recorded per song, often it’s one singer and multiple guitarrist per record. So I’d love this feature!
This problem has been the bane of my digital music organizing existence since 1997. An elegant way to accommodate this would make Plex stand out.
My dream scenario…
Question: If I perform a search because I’m in the mood to listen to a particular artist but some songs are credited to multiple artists, what do I do? Answer: No problem. The song will be included because it shows up under each one of the artists’ names. Outcome: Perfection.
Other scenarios include wanting to listen to groups who are distinctive, but not prominently featured. The Jordanaires. They had their own albums, but also contributed prolifically as the Nashville A-Team. Maybe this is a stretch, but what about the Funk Brothers or The Swampers.
Using this example, if I search for “Phil Collins,” then the album Duke by Genesis should show up in the search results, but it doesn’t. Frustrating. As @icarrizal suggested above, the Artist tag should also be searchable.
Well, most music players accept “;” as a separator in basically any field and Plex seems to recognize it too, it just only reads the first item (ie. an Album Artist tag with “Phil Collins; Genesis” would only show in Plex as “Phil Collins”.
Fun fact: Google Play Music recognizes the ; too but substitutes it for a / and still groups it as only one artist (ie. “Phil Collins / Genesis”, the extra space is not an error).
Edit: Plex seems to do the same thing as Google Play Music: replace ; with / but doesn’t split the entries in to multiple artist. Kodi has it right.
+1. I use flac, which has a much more expressive tag structure. Was quite annoyed when I found out Plex had stripped multiple artists and picked randomly which one to assign to a given track/album. Classical music requires much more flexibility.
