I love the new 3.0 interface and I really like how we can do advanced filtering on library views. Filtering is really useful for creating Smart Playlists, which I use a lot. I have some issues that I’ll be detailing in their own individual threads. Here’s one that bugs me.
The fields I can search/filter against don’t match the fields I can sort against
Let’s take a look. In a music library, here are the fields that I can select as columns in my list view:
And here are the fields I can search/filter against:
Why don’t these match? If I can sort by the rating, I should be able to filter by rating. Same with the artist; the filters only work against the Album Artist, not the track’s Artist.
Yeah, I was just thinking about writing up something similar. What is “Artist Title?” Is it the Artist’s name? With regard to ID3 tags, is it Album Artist or Track Artist (should be track artist. Technically, the ID3 spec doesn’t have a tag for album artist - but that’s for a different discussion. 
)?
@beckfield said:
Yeah, I was just thinking about writing up something similar. What is “Artist Title?” Is it the Artist’s name? With regard to ID3 tags, is it Album Artist or Track Artist (should be track artist. Technically, the ID3 spec doesn’t have a tag for album artist - but that’s for a different discussion. 
)?
Well the thing about PLEX is that it’s not actually using your tags. As I understand it, it looks at your embedded tags when it imports your music to a library, but that information is copied into PLEX’s own library database. So all the metadata that PLEX searches and filters against is what’s stored in PLEX; that’s how you can edit items in PLEX without affecting the file itself.
The problem here, specifically for the Album Artist and Artist fields, is that PLEX does store the track’s artist in its database as Artist; it just doesn’t let us actually filter/search against that field.
Now personally, I like that we can filter a Track view with things like “Artist Country” and “Album Decade.” That kind of deeper filtering is useful too; but we should be able to filter tracks with all of the track’s available attributes.
Filtering, no, but you can search on the (track) Artist.
‘The Buggles’ is the track artist for this track on an album where ‘Album Artist’ is ‘Various Artists.’
@beckfield said:
Filtering, no, but you can search on the (track) Artist.
‘The Buggles’ is the track artist for this track on an album where ‘Album Artist’ is ‘Various Artists.’
How about that! Still, until I can make Smart Playlists for specific artists it’s not enough. xD
Agreed. Just wanted to let you know that bit.
We also lost the rating stars.
So, we cannot create a Smart-Playlist with a specific “mood or genre” and “rating = 4 & 5 stars” anymore.
But I’m sure this will be corrected on the next update. I really prefer the new filter interface. 
