I’ve been reading everything I can about organizing music files in Plex. I’ve been doing this for 2 years now and haven’t found a good solution that handles my singles. Here’s an example I found today.
I thought singles were supposed to go into a [standalone recordings]/ folder, but then I noticed some other singles were put into their own albums as track 01 via Picard.
I’ve also saved some files without album information only to see those loose files under the artist name.
I wanna pick one method and use that method for everything:
Album named the same as the song, and the single is track 01.
[standalone recordings]/ directory (not working consistently though).
Not in Plex.
In fact, there are no standalone recordings in Plex. Each track belongs into a release.
Singles are “releases”.
Albums are “releases”.
EPs are “releases”.
i.e. singles should be treated exactly the same as albums.
With an AlbumArtist tagged that has identical content for each track on that single release.
With a separate folder which holds all the tracks on that single. Even if there is only one track in total.
i.e. version 1) of your options above.
Editing the tags after the items has been already added to Plex will sometimes not change anything. Cue the Plex Dance (you can leave out step 4 with music content)
Plex only supports one AlbumArtist per release. So these releases are either all getting combined under Christina Aguilera, or (worse) all albums by Christina Aguilera will be shown as “Christina Aguilera featuring [soandso]”.
Decide on the main single artist for a given release. Then move the album to the appropriate artist folder and embed only this one name as AlbumArtist metatag.
Interesting. That’s a different way from how I’ve been doing it this whole time . I’ve been using the built-in search.
In terms of where these go, I’m actually in a spot with Moosebutter. I got a bunch of their singles, and the artist names are all different, but the album artist, as it were, would be moosebutter.
I’ve seen the albumartist tag, but I didn’t know what it was. Is that required for songs to be grouped into the correct albums for that artist?
Absolutely. It is very important in Plex.
Even more so, if you enable “Prefer local metatags”. Which is almost a must if you e.g. want to have several versions of the same album in your library.
If this tag is absent from your files, you are relying completely on Plex’s ability to find the correct album on Musicbrainz. Which most of the time works just fine, but when it doesn’t it’s nerve-wrecking. So my recommendation is to always insert it.
You’ll want to observe these rules:
all tracks on a given album must have identical content in the AlbumArtist tag. You can fill the regular Artist tag of each individual track with different names though, to cater for collaborations etc.
all albums which have the same AlbumArtist can be grouped into the same Artist folder in your media storage. You absolutely want to avoid having albums with different AlbumArtists to be stored in the same folder.
If you don’t stick to the above, results in Plex can be unpredictable and errors difficult to correct.
Thanks Otto! That gives me something to work with going forward. Now if only I had some way of auto-naming stuff without relying on MusicBrainz such as VGMdb and freedb.org and other similar ones.
I’m wondering if local metatags is actually better than having Plex look stuff up anyway.
While I do look up my music on MB, I still have “prefer local meta tags” activated.
This allows me to have several versions of the same album. And also override album artist assignments. For instance I have all Frank Zappa bands merged under his name. Splitting between “Frank Zappa” and “Mothers of Invention” just doesn’t make sense to me and gets in the way all the time. Yet, Musicbrainz insist they are separate.
I had the same with a couple artists recently that were associated.
I realized that Album Artist is a way to group artists and “Artist” is the way you list who worked on the song. It could be multiple singers or groups.
. I’ve been using the built-in search.