I am running Plex Media Server on Ubuntu which is great at listing my collection of music albums but I can't get it to list my large collection of singles correctly as it tries to find the album that each track is on. Does anyone know how I can make Plex list singles as singles.
Put your singles in their own folder separate from your albums. I use alphabetical subfolders but they’re not necessary. In your ID3 tags, Artist and Album Artist should be exactly the same. Don’t leave it blank or use Various Artists. For the Album tag, copy the track name plus (single). For example, if the track title is Walk this Way, the album title would be Walk this Way (single). Leave all track numbers blank.
If you’re using Mp3Tag, and you already have the Track Title and Artist tags filled in you can automatically fill in your tags in this format. Under Actions, create a new action called Artist to Album Artist. Edit it and use this code: Format value “ALBUMARTIST”: %artist%
Create another action and call it Title to Album (single). Edit it and use this code: Format value “ALBUM”: %title% (single)
You can use those actions to automatically fill in all of your the Album Artist and Album tags. In Plex, create a new music library and add your singles folder. Make sure you choose the _use embedded tags _option. You can check download popular track information if you want.
It’s not perfect but it kind of works. When it queries Last.fm or whatever for each “album”, it’s includes the word (single). It ends of returning a lot of scans of singles, even if the name is the single is the title track of an album (sometimes). It’s not perfect but it kind of works.
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I’m new to Plex this year and have struggled to import my collection of singles. Considering a lot of modern artists don’t release albums and instead various singles. These tend to be collaborations with other artists (eg; Major Lazer & DJ Snake - Lean On (feat. MØ)).
Plex needs to consider how to handle this type of music going forward or become obsolete as a music player.
From playing around with Plex I can confirm this is the best method I’ve tried to date to bring singles in. The downside is that you have to have a separate library for singles and albums.
The only alteration I’ve made to the above instructions is make the ‘Album Artist’ simple instead of including additional artists.
Eg; “Alex Gaudino (Feat. Crystal Waters) - Destination Calabria”. Make the Album Artist “Alex Gaudino” not “Alex Gaudino (Feat. Crystal Waters)”. It groups the artists tracks together and is able to match with album art etc.
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