It seems Plex and MusicBranz describe classical music wrong.
Often I can see, the Composer is set as Album Artist, which is wrong.
For instance, do you now any albums made by Frederic Chopin? No! He is the Composer.
The Album Artist is e.g. Dresden Filharmonic Orchestra.
Now, I should move my classical albums into seperate library with “Prefer local tags” setting. Please fix the problem with classical music tagging.
Actually Composer as Album Artist would seem to be the appropriate choice, and that is the way classical music stores generally set out their wares. Exceptions would be recitals of multiple composers’ works by a single artist or ensemble. I use “Various Classical” to handle more random compilations, so that they are locatable separately from “Various Artists” for popular music. (Do you know any albums made by “Various Artists”)
The Artist field is for the performer, and that would be the same as Album Artist only in a recital case.
Another argument is that Plex (Spotify, most online music stores) doesn’t support Composer fields for Classical, Jazz and other genres where it matters. I’ve seem statements from every vendor of online music platforms state for years that they’re looking forward to implementing support for such, but really only the specialist platforms ever do that. iTunes often lists Chopin, Beethoven as the performer., and it’s nearly impossible to find a disc based on composer+performer/artist.
Album Artist = an artist who released the album e.g. Filharmonic Orchestra
Composer = Chopin, Beethoven etc.
Treating a Composer as an Album Artist is wrong.
There are a couple of existing feature requests that cover this. It’s better to add you votes to existing requests, rather than splitting votes across several threads:
Or, for the Composer tag specifically:
That’s an assertion rather than an argument. A composer is as much an artist as a performer.
Who do you put for movie soundtracks - a list of session musicians?
This is why you’d rather have one Artist list, with individual tracks/albums tagged with the specific roles (performer, composer, conductor, remixer, lyricist, producer, etc). The tags are there, Plex just doesn’t use them.
This is also how Discogs and RYM do it. Go to the artist view and you see a nice list of releases, categorized by role. Want to see only “composers”? Just one click to reduce the list to composers.
Plex at this point also hasn’t connected the “track artist” and “album artist” fields - view an artist, and only his full albums (where he is “album artist”) show, his compilation tracks don’t appear in the list. Dive into the sqlite database and you’ll see why: “track artists” are just stored as a free text field, they’re not references to a parent id in the artist list (like album artists).
But I understand this is not easy to implement - changing to a more Discogs/RYM approach means a major rewrite of everything: the scanner, the database structure, the queries, the server, the API, and all the clients.
Early 2021 clean-up: duplicate
