Dealing with compilations & soundtracks seems to be a universal headache with media players, so I was wondering how others handle it. To be clear, I’m talking about media players separating albums based on the artist and not keeping these albums together, making it hard to play them as one.
I used to use MediaMonkey, so I made the Album Artist the album name and then could browser by that along with Artist as an option to choose the song. Plex seems to read the Album Artist field as Artist, so none of the songs are showing up when I browse by Artist, so I might change some tags, but I thought I’d see how other people handled this before I went through the trouble. It’s always interesting to see others’ solutions.
I would advise NOT to check mark or add a field that indicates these tracks are as a compilation.
Apparently a new mechanism in Plex has created a separate sub category within Various Artists page with a strip with Compilations listed located way on the bottom, even though that’s exactly what Various Artists is.
I’ve used iTunes as my previous music organizer and metadata editor and iTunes has a check box that sets the album as a compilation, which for years had various outcomes in Plex.
Now that Plex changed the Various Artists classifications, I need to take out those albums on the bottom and uncheck them as compilations otherwise they won’t appear with the rest of the albums. Keep Album Artist field as Various Artists and that should be all that’s needed.
Not all albums with “Various Artists” as their album artist are actually compilations.
There might also be genuine “collaboration” albums and soundtracks with original material.
You can disable the categorization of releases in Plex. But only for the server as a whole:
Settings - “Show Advanced” - Server - Library - “Group albums by type”
Here is one of my sampler albums:
“Album Artist” has been tagged to Various Artists
while the “[Track] Artist” has been tagged with the actual performer of the track.
(although in this particular case, there might be good arguments to assign it to Depeche Mode and not to Various Artists – but that is not the topic of this thread)
As you can see, this album is stored inside an “artist folder” which hosts all albums with “Various Artists”.
This is crucial in Plex! If albums with differing album artists are stored within the same “album artist” folder, chaos can (& most likely will) ensue.
I didn’t know about Plexamp’s “Appears On.” Thanks! I don’t use Plexamp much, but hopefully that will make it to the regular app.
So for me, in the regular Plex amp, with the Album Artist set to the soundtrack/compilation name, I can be in artists, go to, say “Batman Forever” and hit play. Just to make sure I’m understanding the organization correctly, if I were to change all of those to “Various Artists,” I’d go to “Various Artists” and then have to go to “Batman Forever,” correct?
You’ve completely lost me here. This sounds like an issue related to a tag from iTunes conflicting with how Plex organizes things. I’m not sure the connection between the topic. Can you clarify?
Nope… it’s been fine in Plex for, at least 8-9 years, as it’s the same as setting it to “Various Artists,” as most do. But maybe I’m missing part of what you’re saying as you seem to be referencing storage, not metadata.
Correct. I shouldn’t have hijacked the thread but I learned something new in the process. I have the Group albums by type check marked and that caused some of my Various Artists albums to be sub categorized as Compilations.
Is there a reason why the chosen way to display Compilations are in the form of a banner rather than say collapsible. It seems odd to scroll through a carousel of an unknown number of compilations. I would think having it displayed with a collapsible arrow would have been a better approach to have displayed them.
So to be clear, outside of Plexamp, there’s no way to browse by artist and have Plex show you their tracks on compilations or soundtracks, right? I’m guessing the Plexamp method will make it to the main app at some point.
Weird. I’m seeing the artists’ albums being broken down… Singles & EPs, Live Albums, Compilations (of their own work, like greatest hits albums) etc… but I’m not seeing albums where they aren’t marked as the Album Artist, but appear, on the web or Android app; only the Plexamp app.
(So, I’m seeing my Faith No More albums broken down in categories, but nothing on their artist page is pointing me to the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack or the Details comilation.)
Someone’s doing a little movie marathon here and I haven’t updated to 1.25.6.5577 yet. Maybe it’s new and will show up after?
That’s correct.
The „Appears on“ section is currently only available in Plexamp.
The release category breakdown available in the other apps is about albums, eps, soundtracks, compilations of that specific (album) artist.
