Before I add any music to my Plex library, I meticulously tag in MP3Tag.
How should I tag a guest artist on an album so that the guest artist can be found in a Plex search?
For example, if the album artist is Bob Marley, but on a particular track Peter Tosh is a featured singer–a duet with Bob Marley, how should I properly tag Peter Tosh? I’d like to be able to search Plex for Peter Tosh and have that album or song be a search result.
Unfortunately, this can’t be done in Plex.
And a shame that is!
In the situation described by the OP, I always add all of the contributing artists to the Artist tag, leaving Album Artist as the single primary artist.
This doesn’t help Plex yet, but it seems like the right thing to do and maybe someday it will pay off.
The team, or at least Elan, clearly loves music support since they put so much work into Plexamp. With just a few more foundational updates, we’d be sitting pretty!
Thanks BanzaiInstitute. Yes indeed on listing the artists within the Artist tag.
I’d seen the double backslash approach, but didn’t know if there were any real world benefits.
So far, in Artist tag, I’ve seen:
“Bob Marley & Peter Tosh”
“Bob Marley\\Peter Tosh”
“Bob Marley, Peter Tosh”
and in Title tag:
“Song Title (featuring Peter Tosh)”
In mp3tag the double backslash is how you enter a “null separator,” meaning that you are actually entering multiple pieces of data into that tag. (I think you can configure the method it uses and \\ is the default.) The problem we have here is that Plex cannot read multiple values from most fields – but other music software can. So, if you are a picky tagger it is always a good idea (IMHO) to put in multiple artists or even genres even if every app cannot make use of the info. However you do need to make sure that the most important value comes first since Plex cannot see the rest.
I have mp3tag actions set up to take common human-readable formats like these…
A feat. B
A, B
A & B
And turn them into
A\\B
Even though it’s currently pointless for Plex, it just seems like the right thing to do. And as much as I like Plex I may want to try other music software too.
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