+1
Without this feature it really makes Plex unuseable for a large or diverse collection of music.
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I support this idea! I wonder why tagging repositories like Gracenote don’t take this into account. IMO it would really easy if we could add them all to the Sort Artist Field separated by commas or semicolons. In that way we might see the album displayed under both artist’s sections, which would be really cool.
My library is huge, HUGE at almost 700,000 songs. I hate retagging. Please fix this Plex.
So…how many votes/years does it take to get a feature in this program? This is isn’t even a feature request, it’s a bug fix (can’t search for a song by artist name) and it has 50 paid user votes and has been sitting for 4 years? Seriously?
No wonder Roon is a thing. I was wondering why anyone would pay $100 a year to listen to their mp3s. I guess it’s because it actually returns a search result.
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Since mp3s use “/” as artist separators Have Plex also use it. Since there are instances where albums have multiple artists such as Bob Dylan and The Band collaborating, or one or more songs have either guest singers, duets, or collaborations.Have the “/” work in both. Also have detailed data about each track be able to read from mp3/flac when initially scanned. Add a way to scan just one artist/albums/track so that any/all data for that artist/albums/track separated or recently corrected data can be read and credited correctly. Also, some Albums have different graphics per LP/CD/Cassette, can plex please read if CD art differs per CD so that tracks display the art for theie specific CD while maintaining a single or alternating album cover. Just read/compare if the album has multiple CDs then give an option for different or same CD art. If the same all CDs per that album use the album art, otherwise each CD can have art specified. Let’s not use “,” to separate artist. I use “,” to separate “The” and “A” from the band name, as follows…
“The Band” with the tag “Band, The” is displayed as “The Band” yet sort to “Band, The” and therefore sorts to B’s not the T’s.
and
“A Perfect Circle” with the tag “Perfect Circle, A” is displayed as "A Perfect Circle"yet sort to “Perfect Circle, A” and therefore sorts to P’s not the A’s.
also if instead
“A Perfect Circle” with the tag “A Perfect Circle” is used it is displayed as “A Perfect Circle” and also sorted to “A Perfect Circle” and not modified by Plex as “Perfect Circle, A” and therefore sorts correctly to A’s not the P’s.
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Blockquote
Since mp3s use “/” as artist separators Have Plex also use it. Since there are instances where albums have multiple artists such as Bob Dylan and The Band collaborating, or one or more songs have either guest singers, duets, or collaborations.Have the “/” work in both.
Yes this has been a long-standing suggestion, already mentioned in this feature request:
https://forums.plex.tv/t/id3-tag-support-for-robust-music-library-organization
Basically the Artist field (also Genre, btw) should be a multivariant attribute in the internal Plex database, currently it isn’t.
This is a long standing issue, and the reason for the much-maligned “Plex Dance”: if metadata changes, Plex will only process the change if the file is first deleted from the library, all caches purged, and re-added.
Yes here we encounter the same problem as in many other cases: some fields like Genre and Album Art are only used in the internal Plex database on the Album level, not on the Track level.
Separate database fields like Sort Title, Sort Album, Sort Artist are used for this, again also discussed in the other topic 
+1 for multiple tag support.
I think that we need meta views, i.e. be able to create our own views to the media library based on any metadata, like you can do in Winamp. This will allow both the full multiple artists support, any many other things.
I put such a feature request here: Create virtual views based on tags (music)
You’re definitely on to something here, @mongjohn. I like your suggestion. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently with the recent additions I have made to various albums in my library in the rap and hip-hop genre.
As a quick fix solution, I think it would need to come down to the matching option within Plex. That way it doesn’t matter what you name the music file outside of Plex as it can be a personal preference.
For example, in your track listed above, I would have tagged it accordingly:
Title: I Need a Doctor
Album: Detox
Artist: Dr. Dre, Eminem & Skylar Grey
Album Artist: Eminem
So, because our naming conventions are different, that shouldn’t reflect our consistent implementation into Plex. By default, our Artist “Eminem”, if matched correctly, should automatically populate our Detox album, album artwork, tracklisting, year of release, and all featured artists on their respective tracks.
Now, within that, we should be able to match the album, either to CDDB, Last.fm, or even manually, if you’ve named them specifically in your tagging application. If the manual option is chosen, Plex should have a script that looks at Artist tags with separators after seeing that our actual matched Artist for Eminem has already been matched to “Eminem” only, not a group in which Eminem is associated with (for this specific album instance) - Tupac, Tupac Shakur and/or 2pac matched with Tupac & Outlawz (and the various other spellings) would be an example where this would cause confusion and you would need to select a specific overarching Artist to properly match the details with.
Now, because the album has been matched, it should automatically pull out each artist’s name tag the same way as the “Similar Artists” tag works within the edit screen for the Artist within Plex. Even if we had that control for each specific song, that would allow us to add multiple artists to that song. Further to this, each new artist instance would populate an artist page within Plex and instead of displaying a list of albums for that artist, we would see the top songs and maybe an “additional songs” listing below. We would also have their banner photo, artist photo, bio, music videos (even if it is for the featured song) and current tour details.
This would really beef up the music library for the rap/hip-hop/r&b/pop side of things and would allow users to explore music in these genres by having more artist profiles within their Plex library.
Essentially, being able to add all collaborating artists, including the album artist (which should currently populate by default), in the Artist section of individual songs similar to tagging artists in Similar Artists section - If artists don’t appear in the user’s library, a setting to display artist pages for these artists should be implemented.
Spot on. The option should be configurable at the library level, just like the option to use embedded metadata tags in lieu of a 3rd party, web based source.
The ability to add collaborating artists is by default built into the ID3 tag that’s embedded in every MP3 file. Any tags you add or edit in PLEX are NOT saved in the MP3 file. Rather, they’re proprietary to PLEX and saved only in PLEX’s database. If/when you copy the file to another device, all the tagging you did within PLEX will be lost. It’s a flawed system that will ultimately have you screaming out loud.
Therefore, I recommend and only use an external editor to manage ID3 tags. Make the updates to the files, themselves, outside of PLEX, then have PLEX read the tags by scanning and using the embedded metadata. In the long run, you’ll be glad you did, your library will be organized the way you want and your tagged files will be portable.
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While Plex Music is severely lacking in several departments metadata within a music package can be manipulated with Mp3Tag. I have a Keb’ Mo’ gathering and a collection of single tracks - that I KNOW Plex wants in an album, so I created an album (in the interest of time/sanity):
Willie appears on one of them (more accurately, Keb’ appears in Willie’s Song, but whatever):
I spent several hours without much luck, read this thread and learned about the Keb’ Mo’/Willie Nelson trick, employed it, and it works for the immediate purpose.
Is that a work-around? Could be, but it does work for the time being.
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That’s a good work around.
I’ve stopped thinking in terms of “albums” and instead now think in terms of “releases.” A release could be in the form of a single, EP, album, radio spot, radio interview, etc.
By way of example, The Who released a lot of singles that were not a part of an album release. In order to get them to flow chronologically in my library, I tag those single-only releases as if they were an album. The result works perfectly.
I also use this method when I only want a song or two from a particular album. I seek out and tag it with the cover art for the single release in lieu of the album art work.
This technique also works great for genre/style specific libraries where you only want the singles/hits, not the entire album. Here’s what it looks like for my collection of disco singles:
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@dmCurator - Totally understand that the tagging within Plex is within Plex only and not writing to the actual files ID3 Tag. I use Yate on Mac for tagging and it’s quite great for batch processing.
For Singles and EP releases from artists, I use the [EP] and [Single] formatting in the “Album” tag and that translates nicely over to Plex, especially for the matching of artwork and the album can remain as is. If I am syncing to my mobile, I can choose either the album track or the standalone single, if I want the artwork to be unique when driving and on-the-go.
@JuiceWSA I like that Plex understands the “/” syntax, however, this only works for Plex. I also have my music stored in iTunes to sync with my phone and iTunes doesn’t support the “/” in the same way; it strings the entire name with “/” as a single artist which doesn’t look aesthetically pleasing when scrolling and searching through the library to sync and deselect tracks to sync…you can, however, just show the “Album Artist” column to clean it up, but that kind of defeats the purpose of logging all of the metadata.
It’s a great workaround for the Plex side…so hopefully, we see an official Plex update to address this.
Thinking about this in more detail, wouldn’t it be great if the Album section had tabs that broke down the releases? Something like this:
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This would be great! +1 for this and +1 for the original topic. It seems there is a lot of tweeking needing to made to Plex music, but we never seen these great feature suggestions added. A real bummer.
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We’re actually going backwards, with the change to the new “Plex Music” scanner (the replacement of the old one named “Plex Music Scanner”), Plex doesn’t handle track artists on compilations correctly anymore:
https://forums.plex.tv/t/music-compilations-artists-and-album-art-mutual-exclusive/
Still no progress here? Another standard feature for a private music server software that I’d pay for. Not for news, dvr, vod stuff and so on…
The only good thing about this is, while streaming to chromecast, the ID3 Artists text is shown on TV at least. But of course not useable to search/filter etc…
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This feature is really basic. If Plex starts using the composer tag and accept “;” or “/” to separate multiple artists, will instantly make himself a better contender in the music department. Maybe it even be able to bring some folks that are using Roon to Plex, as is much cheaper and offer the ability to stream outside of their network without dealing with a VPN.
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Using “;” or “/“ as a custom separator is nonstandard and a bit of a hack, ideally Plex would just support multi-value tags in Vorbis/id3/mp4 natively. But at this point, I’ll take any way to do it.
But the problem is mainly that it looks easy but it touches on a lot of code, so it’s a lot of work:
- the scanner needs to be able to read multi-value tags (it currently doesn’t) This is btw the reason why the “hack” way of doing this with custom separators started, you can then fudge multiple values into 1 value.
- the Plex internal SQLite database needs to be able to store multiple values for the artist (or genre, composer, etc) field - it currently doesn’t
- the Plex API needs to be able to transfer these multiple values per field to the clients (it currently doesn’t)
- the clients need to be able to handle multiple values (they currently don’t)
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Actually, using “/” to separate multiple entries in a tag is specified in the ID3 specification. Plex already supports this in Genres.
Where? id3v2.3 doesn’t say anything about separators (edit: ah wait yes some fields are indeed / separated: composer, lyricist and artist, but not album artist TPE2, remixer or genre)
id3v2.4 specifies a null separator instead of / , probably because there were some annoyed AC/DC fans:
There may only be one text information frame of its kind in an tag. All text information frames supports multiple strings, stored as a null separated list, where null is reperesented by the termination code for the charater encoding.
A / separator in id3v2.4, Vorbis (FLAC) or mp4 is definitely wrong though. Where the also often seen ; came from - no idea.
Plex only supports multiple genres (max two) on the album level, id3/Vorbis/mp4 tags are per track. Plex only reads one genre per track. So an album with tracks tagged as:
Track 1, genre Country, year 1978
Track 2, genre Hip-Hop, year 1980
Track 3, genre Reggae, year 1976
Track 4, genre Pop, year 2011
unfortunately become an album with “Country” and “Hip-Hop” as genres, and 2011 as year. The tracks will have no individual genres or years stored in the Plex database (they are always empty), but inherit these from the album level through the “parent id”.
