How to catalog classical music files in my music library?

Hi,
I need some help on how to manage my classical music collection in Plex.
Let me start from an example: as you know Beethoven wrote symphonies. Then, these symphonies are played by many different orchestras, and directed by many different directors.
The Composer of a disk is clearly Beethoven. The Artist of the disk on the contrary is Beethoven, the director and the orchestra playing the disk.
Example: here
Beethoven, Antal Dorati and the London Symphony Orchestra are the 3 different artists of this disk.
When I add this disk to a music library in Plex, the proposed Artist is always Beethoven.
This makes finding the right disk to be played impossible. I have to modify the tags of all of my entries in Plex and manually add the other artists: the director and the orchestra.
Should I put these disks under “Various artists”? I’m not sure I want to. I think Various artists is more for compilations, which these kind of disks are clearly not.
How would you propose I organise my library?

Thank you for any help on the subject :slight_smile:
Riccardo

Plex’s inadequate support of classical music is, unfortunately, a long-standing issue. To be fair, it’s a complex puzzle. The root of the problem is that Plex does not support all of the available metadata tags that would allow it to properly catalog these albums. I have written a feature request to improve that, but until that happens, the only solution that works for me is to do the following:

  • Make the Album Artist the composer (ex., “Beethoven”)
  • Make the Artist the orchestra, or orchestra and conductor (ex., “Berlin Philharmonic” or “Berlin Philharmonic, Karajan”)

In Plex, the Album Detail page will appear like this:

On Beethoven’s Artist Detail page, you would see this:

Or you could choose to view it in Detail View, and add text to the Review tag identifying conductor/orchestra:

Now, I’m not one to have 20 copies of Beethoven’s symphonies by different orchestras in my library. But this scheme would seem to be the only practical one, even in that case, until Plex expands its support for more tags.

Thank you for your ideas! I’ll try and BTW I find your feature request a good step towards the good direction and I voted it.
I’d like to add that I find the decision to use Musicbrainz as online source for albums metadata an error.
I find it complex for common people. I’ve been working in IT for years and understand basics of data modelling, still I spent half an hour to enter a new disk (this one).
The same disk is already present on : discogs, allmusic, lastfm and who knows in how many other databases.
What’s the point of yet another database containing precisely the same information?
To sum-up I think musicbrainz has been chosen by IT engineers for IT engineers, but plex users are more varied than that.

Musicbrainz certainly took a little time to figure out, but, personally, I don’t want it to be too easy to use. I remember when CDDB and freedb were freely editable by anyone - they were both full of garbage, and there seemed to be no oversight. MB has a lot of garbage in it, too (much less since I’ve been editing :rofl:), but I’ve found it relatively easy to make corrections. It’s certainly easier than Discogs, but, to be fair, I haven’t spent a lot of time there. The experts in the MB community are helpful and pretty vigilant.

I think one of the driving forces in the decision to use MB is that it links to AllMusic, Last.FM, and fanart.tv, and perhaps others. So Plex only has to communicate with MB, and MB gathers info from the other sources. I imagine that simplifies things for Plex.

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