When I access my Classical Music library, I want to see a list of composers. I’d like to then find the albums (by various orchestras) under that composer.
I’ve almost been able to accomplish this by setting the metadata for Album Artist to the composer and using Collections to organize by Artist (orchestra). It’s almost perfect.
The issue is when an album has more than one composer on it.
For organizing classical music in a digital library, it makes sense (to me) to have a directory for one composer ‘here’ and another composer ‘there’. This is how my folders are organized. However, without the ability to sort by composer, this prevents listening to a whole original recording.
I have tried to swap the methodology - swapping Artist and Album Artist metadata and using Collections to organize composers. While this does sort an album with two composers under the same orchestra, it’s still showing the recording as two separate albums. Again, breaking the ability to listen to a whole recording. Yes, compilation is enabled. I have not recognized my folders though - could this bee the issue?
Is there any chance Plex could simply add Composer and/or Conductor to resolve all these needed work arounds?
I really really really hope they will do this at some point. but I think all they ever said about this is that it will require big changes in the database.
Edit: I spoke too soon. The manually created Collection just dumps all the tracks into the collection without the ability to play just an album. It’s just a mess.
This is the best work around I’ve found so far.
Set track Metadata as Artist: composer, Album Artist: orchestra.
Organize folders by Orchestra.
Plex will show Artist as the Orchestra.
Manually create Collections for every composer.
Plex presents this as:
Artist > Orchestra > Album > full album.
Collection > Composer > Album > tracks attributed to Album Artist (composer).
Unable to use Smart Collection because the search for Artist Title uses the Album Artist metadata instead of Artist.
I concede that, in a digital library world, this makes sense. The album is (typically) put out by the orchestra so that would be the Album Artist and each track could be composed / written / attributed to the Artist. It just doesn’t make much sense in the Classical music world.
Again, a lot of this would be easily resolved by simply utilizing Composer metadata and/or fixing the Smart Collection search to look at both the Album Artist and the Artist. The latter would, I’m sure, be a very welcome addition to music nerds. Imagine creating a Smart Collection of Snoop Dogg or Kanye as guest artists or writers or producers across all your music.
Its maddening. And utterly insane that people have been begging for this for YEARS and we still don’t have a good solution. Not even a real workable one.
