How do you get Plex to recognize multiple album artists and track artists?

[tjs26]

I have been fiddling all day with Plex, trying to get it to recognize multiple artists in the album artist and track artist fields. Example:

Album Artist: John Dowland & Robert Jones
Album: Dowland and Jones - Lute Songs
Track Artist: Emma Kirkby, Anthony Rooley

Issue 1: When not set to prefer local metadata, the only artist it pulls in for the album is the first one, in this case John Dowland. It ignores Robert Jones altogether. When I set it to prefer local metadata, it recognizes “John Dowland & Robert Jones” as the artist, and does not split them up. That means only one artist is generated if I’m browsing by artist.

Issue 2: Plex doesn’t pull track artists into the browse-by page at all. Track artists are searchable, but do not generate new entries in my artists. Both Emma Kirkby and Anthony Rooley are not browsable. I have tried all manner of separating artist names. Commas, semicolons, slashes… none of them work.

Does anyone know of a solution to this? Plex is a near-perfect product but the support for music is somewhat lacking.

Server Version#:1.20.1.3252
Player Version#:4.29.2

[beckfield]

It’s one of the long-standing feature requests, because currently Plex can’t do what you’re asking.

Better support for albums and tracks with multiple artists

Currently, Plex is basically limited so that every album and track has one and only one artist. A ton of songs have more than one artist, and currently, there’s no good way to represent this in Plex. You could set the artist to something like “ArtistA and ArtistB”, but then that track/album will show up as a new artist, and it won’t show up under “ArtistA” or “ArtistB”. This is inconvenient and annoying. Instead of the “artist” field just being a text box, what if it were a “tags” box, where yo…

[dwtech]

I second these concerns. As my library has grown, this is becoming much more annoying. I’ve considered switching to Roon but then I can’t remote stream or download content.

[certuna]

I guess most of us are either waiting for Plex to do a major revamp of its music metadata model, or waiting until someone else implements it.

At the moment, Navidrome is furthest along I think, but still in heavy development (support for multiple artists & genres per track is planned but not implemented yet), and at this stage definitely not as polished as Plex is.

[tjs26]

Yeah I’m shocked Roon doesn’t have remote streaming capabilities or support on Android boxes without workarounds. If they do I might jump ship, at least for music. But lifetime subscription to Roon is extremely expensive comparatively.

[dwtech]

Yeah, but their subscriptions are their only source of revenue so I wouldn’t feel bad doing yearly to support development. Still no reason for me to get Roon if I can’t remote stream or download

[nonplayer]

I came here looking for this, as I was hoping to finally be able to cut the spotify cord and use Plex for my music collection. But the inability to see or even search by Track Artist is just plain ridiculous.