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I have some music compilations. For example, movie soundtracks and tributes to various bands. Maybe 13 tracks by 13 different bands each. I’ve got them stored under “Shared Music/Various”.
When I look at my music by artist it shows all the artists on these compilations. Most of these artists only have 1, maybe 2 songs. At least half the artists I see only have 1-2 songs, not an entire album. I do not want this. I do not like this. In programming terms, these compilations pollute my artist namespace.
Is there some way I can display my music in more of a directory format? That is, don’t show an artist unless there is an album by that artist in my collection?
What you’re describing (Artist pages for artists on Various Artist albums) is something that people, including me, have been asking Plex to add for years. If you’ve done it, even inadvertently, I’m surprised. But I’m guessing it’s because the metadata is not correct.
Do all the tracks from these albums have the same Album Artist tags (“Various Artists”), and the same Album title? If they don’t, you might try fixing that. Plex may then display them the way you want.
For example, here’s one from my library. The Album Artist is “Various Artists,” the individual track artists are whoever they are, and the album title is the same for all tracks. Plex displays the album like this:
By metadata do you mean MP3 tags, or directory layout? My directory layout is how you show it, but I have not looked at my MP3 tags.
I’m a dying breed. I listen to albums, not songs. It’s why I dumped my iPod 10-15 years ago a month after buying it, Apple did not understand the concept of an album as opposed to a song.
I mean MP3 tags. Without them, Plex tries to gather metadata from one of the online services, and I’ve found them to be so full of errors that I don’t trust them.
Since I got my MP3 tags in good shape, and configured Plex to prefer them over online sources, Plex generally does a good job of getting it right.
That certainly sucks ass. It’s easy to arrange my files in a particular directory tree. Editing MP3 tags? I’ve done it a couple times, what a pain in the butt.
Tip: if you already have your music in an immaculate folder structure with well formed (consistent in structure) file names,
you can use software to automatically take this folder structure and file name and derive most of the required meta data from it.
Hi, i don’t know the DB structure PLEX uses (never got the time to look at it), but for me this looks something could be “very simple” to fix. It’s all about how it is storing the data in the DB. Then there can be multiple views of that data. Personally, “Various Artists” is not an artist, and one thing i’ve done was to manipulate the ALBUMARTIST tag to be equal to ARTIST on my compilations media. The good thing is that if i look for artists, i get everyone that is singing something. The drawback is that if you look for albums, the compilation albums appear multiple times (depending on how much artists participated on that compilation). Also, another disadvantage, is that a lot of tracks won’t match, and when metadata refreshes it may take a long time to go through all library…
My suggestions: would be great to have a setting on Library that would allow the user to choose how PLEX would behave for compilation albums. This could be based on:
for the albums with ALBUMARTIST set as blank or Various Artists, treat them as compilation, and that would mean to capture artists from tracks and not the ALBUMARTIST tag
as an alternative, if the user prefers to have it as any other album, then PLEX would capture artist as Various Artists. No change from what we have right now.
I may be missing something here, but am open for discussion and help make PLEX even better than what it is already.
