Discography based audio collection : Studio Albums, Remastered Albums, Single Albums, Live Albums and Compilations

Feature Suggestions
1

I would love to see the ability of Plex to sort according to Studio Albums, Remastered Albums, Single Albums, Live Albums and Compilations instead of all as ALBUMS.
I collect audio mostly as discographies and sorting like the above would make it fantastic.

Thanks

2

In part, what you’re referencing is the fact that music artists issue “releases,” not all of which are “albums.” One type of release that you didn’t mention is the “single.” Not every “single” or version thereof makes its way on to an “album.”

Not only is this not addressed in standard ID3 metadata tags, but I’ve found no 3rd party metadata source or program that accounts for it.

To partially circumvent this, I think of entries in my library as releases, not albums. I tag each release using an external tag editor and set my library to use “embedded tags.” That way, each each release flows chronologically in the library, regardless of whether it’s a single, an EP, a studio album, a live album or a compilation album.

The Who is a good example of an artist who released a lot of hit singles that never appeared on a studio album.

Capture
Capture919×544 76.9 KB

3 Likes
3

Discogs and Rateyourmusic both store that kind of release type info, so those databases do exist - but Plex doesn’t use those unfortunately.

Also, there are no official id3/Vorbis/etc tags for “release type”, although you could use the Grouping (GRP1 in id3) tag for it, which is a ‘freeform’ tag. But that tag is only supported in more powerful library managers like iTunes and foobar2k, not by Plex yet.

2 Likes
4

MusicBrainz, which Plex now uses in its’ music system, also has release type information stored in their database, including albums, compilations, live, singles and EPs.

For example this page, which shows “The Who’s” single and EP releases:
https://musicbrainz.org/artist/9fdaa16b-a6c4-4831-b87c-bc9ca8ce7eaa?page=2

I don’t think Plex uses as any of that information

1 Like
5

It doesn’t as of now, but it could yes - the setup of the Plex sqlite database should be able to facilitate this, just add an extra field in the Album table “release type” that it could populate with Musicbrainz info (just like “mood” currently, which is also not an embedded id3/Vorbis/etc tag).

Putting this info in the database is step one, then Plex would also have to code the clients to add grouping and/or filtering by release type under the Album and Artist views. A bit of work but but doable I’d think, it wouldn’t require a major change.

1 Like
6

Nice suggestion but won;t it be cumbersome? If Plex somehow has an option that recognizes or assigns named subfolders
eg. if I keep a folder like how it is arranged in discographies.say
Studio Album, Remastered Albums, Live Albums etc and plex should recognize the folder headings.

7

Great idea, especially singles can be very cumbersome to deal with. If those were in a different list, it would make a huge difference in Plex as a music player.

8

Whether it’s cumbersome or not depends on how particular you are about your music. For me, the priority is to have accurate tags embedded in the files themselves so that if/when I use them on a platform other than PLEX, my tags are intact, exactly how I established them.

Using PLEX’s proprietary tags, together with PLEX’s 3rd party metadata service of the day, means I’ve little control over my music library . I’m not prepared to turn the curation of my music over to someone else. Your perspective may be different.

Regarding folder structure, PLEX doesn’t use folder structure to define the library hierarchy or tags. Rather, those are defined either by your embedded tags or the metadata provided by PLEX’s 3rd party provider.

The most important takeaway is that by maintaining your tags outside of PLEX using a 3rd party app, all of your changes are saved/preserved for future use. The minute you move your files to another platform or delete your PLEX music library, all of the tagging you did using PLEX is lost.

Been there, done that, not doing it again.

9

Exactly this, however: the tagging standards for music (id3v2 for MP3, mp4 atoms for AAC, Vorbis comments for FLAC) do not have a field for release type (album, single, ep), except for “compilation“ (“TCMP” in id3v2, which Plex doesn’t support).

We could (ab)use a freeform tag like Grouping (“GRP1” in id3v2), but Plex doesn’t support that one either.

So we end up relying on the classification of the releases in online databases: allmusic, discogs, rateyourmusic, musicbrainz, etc. Out of our control, but at least they’re fairly extensive and accurate.

10

A request for the same feature exists already, and it has more votes.

Therefore this one is closed, to prevent spreading the votes across several threads, even though they vote for the same (or at least very similar thing).

Votes are given back to the users who voted on this request. Please think of re-voting in the other thread if you still want it.

Rules for the Feature Suggestions forum section:

  • Please search before creating a new suggestion thread.
  • Only one feature per thread.

See existing feature suggestions, sorted by most popular first
https://forums.plex.tv/c/general/feature-suggestions/l/votes