Most of my music has multiple artists.
I have organized my music by cleaning up ID3 Tags.
I want to create playlist by artist (not album artist), there are thousands of discussions about this in Plex forums since last 5 years, how difficult is it to add this ? Do they have to re write the whole Plex server software to add this capability?
I Can create playlist by Album Artist, but i am trying to create a playlist using Artist field when there are multiple artists, attached picture might help, i tried your suggestion, when i search in custom filter Plex is still filtering by Album Artist, not track artist.
Appreciate your help.
Except when the track artist is different than the album artist.
Absolutely untrue. The track artist can be the album artist featuring someone else, and… the prime example…
Plex simply doesn’t work with a lot of common albums, like compilations. The album artist has to “Various Artists” for an album to get matched properly, (If it matches at all) That’s a fact. and I’m sure you know it. Track artist are ONLY shown when the track artist is different than the album artist.
Since it’s impossible to search for a track artist in Plex, any tracks on a compilation album are not available to add to a smart play list.
Sadly, your example ONLY works if you do not have any compilation albums. I’ll bet most people do.
No. I didn’t
Here’s an example: a complilation album matched properly by Plex. I have not modified any of the data manually in Plex. I never do. Simply the ID3 tags embedded in the file. Again, it is a match, on MusicBrainz, where Plex gets it’s info from in order to match. The Album Artist is “Various Artists” In fact, MusicBrainz Picard was used to write the tags.
Here’s the link to the album release group on MusicBrainz.
Clearly, the artists are listed, none are the same as the album artist, which is "Various “Artists”
Here’s a screenshot of the album, and it’s tracks. Various Artists is the Album Artist, and each track is a completely different and separate artist. The track artist is NOT various artists.
As far as I can tell, the only way to get the album to show is to search for “Various Artists” as the album artist
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There is no way to search and find the track artists, Eric Clapton, Tinker’s Moon, Billy Joel. etc. Yes I can find those artists if the song is on an album by the artist. Not on a compilation. You cannot search for a track artist. Maybe you can show me how.
Finally, attaching the XML for the first track. It is clearly matched by Plex. The guid’s prove that.
696575.txt (2.4 KB)
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I think we are making this too complicated.
Plex is displaying the Artist field in tracks view, just give us an option to filter/search this field.
If i change Album Artist field to match Artist field then most of my albums will end up in various artists.
Another important field missing from Plex library is composer.
A lot of things would need to change in order to make that happen and that would not fit with Plex’s philosophy.
Is it possible to explain why it is so difficult so that we can put this to rest, if people understand why it is so difficult then may be people will stop asking for these features, there are countless threads in this forum for last 5 years. Plex never explained in detail why this simple feature is not possible, i feel bad that i paid for this software that can’t implement such a simple feature for last 5 years even thought there are so many people asking for it.
I am not a software engineer, i can write a program to filter track list by name X in artist field in 10 minutes using python.
I am running into this too. I have come around to the fact that I have to have miscellaneous tracks in a separate folder by Album artist, but now I’m seeing that there is no way to search or filter for track artist even in the track view. This effectively makes certain songs on “Various Artist” compilations invisible to search or smart playlists. I would even go in and add tracks from compilations to a non-smart playlist of that artist if I could, but i can’t even do that, unless i display all tracks, select them, and add them?
This is because Plex only stores album artist as an indexed field in its internal database, track artist is a simple string. So you can’t include track artists in filters (at least not along with album artists), they won’t be included in the artist view (which only returns album artists), and search also breaks when you include track artists along with other fields. The bad handling of compilations also happens because of this. It was an easy but bad design decision back in 2008, and now they’re stuck with it since there’s twelve years of code built on top. Apple/iTunes, Spotify, MusicBrainz, Discogs, RateYourMusic, all the other big music databases didn’t make this mistake.
Fixing it in Plex means rewriting a lot of core functionality, everywhere: the scanner, the database structure, the API (defining the communication between clients and server), client-side queries, Plex Web, all the client apps on all the platforms. It will break backwards/forwards compatibility completely, too. I don’t expect this to happen soon, if ever. Maybe in Plex 2.0.
So true. I’ve probably added at least 100 albums to MusicBrainz (That is the database Plex uses to match our music to) Many of those additions are compilation albums (Various Artists as the album artist) It’s impossible to add an album to their database if you haven’t properly verified each and every track artist as an existing artist in their database.
Even when the album artist and track artist are identical on every track, each track must have the track artist properly identified.
Every tagging software I’ve used also requires the track artist to be identified. You generally have to select all of the tracks even when you want them to have the same artist.
Plex does know who the track artist is. It will properly show the name of the artist if a track has a different artist than the album artist. If Plex can identify track artists in that circumstance, and you can do a search and find all of the tracks an artist appears on, I can’t see why it’s such an impossible task.
Because track artists are stored as text strings, not stored as an indexed field, like album artists are. So Plex doesn’t actually “know” what the track artist is, it’s just dumped in the database as a text string by the scanner, it’s not stored as a reference to the artist. Album artists however are indexed fields, so can be easily filtered/queried.
Because track artists are not indexed, and album artists are indexed, there’s no (easy) way for Plex to know they’re the same one, or list them together.
If you’re interested in the low-level design, get a database editor/viewer like this one, and open the com.plexapp.plugins.library.db file, go to table metadata_items. For music, all metadata is stored as records with metadata_type 8 (artists), 9 (albums) and 10 (tracks)
You can see how everything is stored/referenced, and how track artists (for some reason, stored in the original_title field, as a text string) and album artists (they are indexed with metadata_type 8, and then referenced against the album under parent_id) are stored in a completely different way, which makes it very hard to do queries across both fields.
Thanks for the explanation, now i understand what the actual issue is, Appreciate your help.
Looks like this will never be fixed, i will have to find an alternative to Plex then.
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