Having the same issue. I have a whole library for compilations and the “library radio” feature absolutely will not work because every album is filed under the “Various Artists” artist. Can’t use the radio, can’t use the mix function, only basic playing and playlist functions.
Here’s what I think: if I’m using a web browser, browsing a compilation music library, and I switch from Recommended view to Library view, if I’m viewing by Artist then I should see a whole range of artists generated from the tracks in those compilations, not just a singular “Various Artists” artist. When I click on those artists, I should see either a list of the tracks for that artist in that library or a list of the albums in that library on which that artist has a track. If I click on that album, I should see that track.
I think what it boils down to is that in a compilation library, you should be able to generate an artist list by the Artist tag rather than by the AlbumArtist tag. Does that make sense to anyone else?
Same issue and I think you’re right. We should be able to create mix with Artists under a compilation.
And, in the Artist View we should be able to have all of the tracks not just those that are classified with AlbumArtist
Are there any workarounds for this? It’s frustrating that it doesn’t work properly. I have a bunch of compilation albums and I didn’t realise that Plex doesn’t fully handle them properly.
ditto, i find this puzzling and frustrating. i have all my tags in order and would like to do an artist view and see, you know, the content of that artist! sadly the ‘various artist’ tracks arent there. sigh…
I put this in as a feature request, only to get it marked as a duplicate…sorry, I didn’t think to look back almost Seven Years to find this similar (though not identical) feature request.
I guess if it’s been ignored this long, it’s never coming. Sigh.
At the moment, Plex’s internal structure is such that:
a Track is strictly linked to one Album id, an Album is strictly linked to one Album Artist id.
track artist is simply stored as a text string in the Track record, it is not linked/linkable in any way with an Album Artist
the Artist section of Plex only displays what’s under the Album Artist id, it has no way of including track artists
Plex could in principle read fields like Composer, Producer, Remixer etc from tags and/or Musicbrainz (that metadata exists there), but they would all have the same limitation: it would be mostly ‘decorative’ info, not linkable to Album Artists, the artist page, etc.
another ‘hard’ limitation of the current structure is that multiple artists for one album or track, like Spotify does, are not possible either
As you saw, there’s not been any change in this for over 10 years. If the devs ever do something about this, it will probably be part of some major structural redesign of the server, PMS 2.0 or something. But I’m just an outsider, there’s not been any info coming from Plex devs.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. All of that makes perfect sense and clarifies things.
Absent some perceived benefit to the business to make the development worthwhile (or perhaps risk from a challenger), I can’t see this ever happening. Pity.
So I just using Plex for music and have been creating some large Playlists and noticed depending on the client you seem to see different results for “Various Artists.”
When I browse a Playlist in a web browser it displays the Track artists and the same on my Android Mobile app and Plex Amp, however on the Android TV Platform it displays there tracks with Various Artists instead of the Track Artists, is it possible to get this display changed?
PlexAmp does part of it with the current database structure.
While it still doesn’t allow searching for artists that are only on compilations or lists the tracks on the artists pages, it does have an extra section “Appears On” that other Plex apps don’t have.
Currently in Plex, when viewing a music artist, the only albums that are shown are those that have the artist specifically listed as the “Album Artist”. It would be nice if you could see other albums that said artist contributed to, even if they are not the “Album Artist”.
This would allow one to easily see collaborations with other artists, and albums such as soundtracks and genre/decade/music label compilation albums that don’t have a specific album artist. Perhaps the specific songs that they contributed to could also be listed?
I would suggest that this be a separate category beneath “Albums” but above “Related Artists”. Perhaps it could be called “Contributing Albums” or “Contributing Albums and Collaborations”.
Having just added 850 songs from 80s compilation CD boxsets, I was disappointed to see that the artists were not listed as individual contributors under ‘artists’ on PlexAmp. Only as ‘various artists’.
I would very much like to see all those artists from the compilations listed individually.
I can use the search, but that’s not really the point.
