I have about 500 pieces of classical music in 1 folder. I’d just assume play them in the order they are listed in the folder (in windows). e…g. from Antonio Vivaldi - Concerto in A minor, RV 397 I. Allegro - Concerto in A minor, RV 397 I. Allegro.flac all the way to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -Zaide, K. 336b_344 (fragment)_ Act I. no. 3 Aria _Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben.flac. However no matter how I display it it tries to organize it - displaying the piece name not the composer. When I look at propties it will say VARIOUS ARTISTS for the Album Artist but it will get the composer right in the Artist.
Since I have all my (classical) music start with the composer - then the piece name - is there a way to have it show exactly that or am I going to have to edit the tags for over 500 pieces and put the composer in where it has album artist?
Just an FYI if I try to just sort by artist it organizes my music into 5 albums (I have about 30 composers) and in no way are the albums real albums or related to the composers in each - you’ll find bach in all 5, same with beethoven etc.
Every one of the files has a genre tag of Classical but when I try to sort by genre nothing comes up.
Plex essentially has two ways to figure out what your music files are. It can use the folder/filename structure, or it can use the embedded tags. If you don’t want to have to fix the embedded tags, then the files have to be in a folder/filename structure that Plex recognizes. This Help page explains that structure. If Plex sees several artists in a single folder, it will naturally assume it is a ‘Various Artist’ album. I’ve had my music thoroughly tagged for a long time, so I don’t know if this method is adequate for classical music. I suspect it would be annoying.
If you want all your music files to be in a single folder, the embedded tags have to be in good shape. With a recent update, I’ve found that Plex is finally able to handle a flat folder structure pretty accurately, as long as the tags are in very good shape. And, yes, since Plex doesn’t read the Composer tag, I’ve had to tag my classical music with the Composer as the Album Artist. Hopefully that will change, but I’ve been hoping for a long time, so…
You could simply view the library in Folder view, but that has always been pretty basic, and recent changes have made it even less useful.
