I’m starting to get a picture of how music is indexed in Plex now. I’ve changed my music library from not using embedded metadata to using embedded metadata, and I’m testing how things work.
Currently I’m looking into a single album: “Pictures At An Exhibition” by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky. And I see that if I set the artist metadata to “Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky”, the Plex artist profile gets the content from one Last.fm profile (https://www.last.fm/music/Modest+Petrovich+Mussorgsky). And if I set the artist metadata to “Mussorgsky, Modest Petrovich”, I get another (https://www.last.fm/music/Mussorgsky+Modest+Petrovich). Setting the metadata to simply “Mussorgsky” (which might be preferable, given that it’s a classical composer), I get nothing at all (I notice Last.fm doesn’t have a “Mussorgsky” profile).
Is this the way I have to do it if I want the Plex artist to contain info from a certain Last.fm bio? Because in this case I would very much like the info from the Last.fm “Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky” profile, since this contains the most info and is the most used for Mussorgsky. But sorting classical composers (and artists in general, for that matter) by their first name is something I’d like to avoid. I’d rather like to use “, <first name(s)>” for general artists and “” for classical composers.
In short, is it possible to have Plex index artists with name written in one form, and point to a Last.fm bio whose name is written in a different form?
@ohjohnsen said:
But sorting classical composers (and artists in general, for that matter) by their first name is something I’d like to avoid.
Plex supports a ‘Sorting name’ for artists, albums, tv shows and movies
Set ‘Sort Artist’ to ‘Mussorgsky, Modest’ and the artist will appear under the letter M
But this only changes the sorting it seems, and not the display name… Correct?
Right.
The display name will be the same as defined in your files’ metadata.
@ohjohnsen said:
Currently I’m looking into a single album: “Pictures At An Exhibition” by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky. And I see that if I set the artist metadata to “Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky”, the Plex artist profile gets the content from one Last.fm profile (https://www.last.fm/music/Modest+Petrovich+Mussorgsky). And if I set the artist metadata to “Mussorgsky, Modest Petrovich”, I get another (https://www.last.fm/music/Mussorgsky+Modest+Petrovich). Setting the metadata to simply “Mussorgsky” (which might be preferable, given that it’s a classical composer), I get nothing at all (I notice Last.fm doesn’t have a “Mussorgsky” profile).
You can manually match the artist by clicking the Match (or ‘Fix Match’) item on the overflow menu:
This may change the display name in Plex, but you can override that after the matching process, and lock the Artist Name field (orange lock), so it won’t get changed in future refreshes.
By the way, I followed the second Last.FM link you provided (https://www.last.fm/music/Mussorgsky+Modest+Petrovich). This profile apparently has no biography info.
In short, is it possible to have Plex index artists with name written in one form, and point to a Last.fm bio whose name is written in a different form?
@ohjohnsen said:
But this only changes the sorting it seems, and not the display name… Correct?
Correct. The Sort Name field only determines how it is sorted.
