Server Version#: (up to date) 1.19.1.2645
Player Version#: (up to date) 6.10.1 (iOS)
Hi,
I have a question about displaying music in the iOS Plex player. I like to group my music by album title, because a lot of my music collection are original soundtracks from movies or games, and for these kinds of music choosing music by artist name doesn’t make a lot of sense.
However, even I sort the music library by album title, Plex still displays the [album] artist name as the main identifier. Both grid view and list view display the artist names as the main identifier, and then album title is displayed as small faded text below the artist name, and this is quite annoying to see so many items with “Various Artists” as their names.
(List view and summary view in the web player handle this better, but grid view in the web player has the same problem.)
Is there any way to customize how music is displayed? If this is hard-coded in the Plex player, can devs make changes to this behavior? When music is grouped by album, for me it makes more sense to display the album title as main text and other information such as the artist name in smaller text as subtitle.
(I think abusing the album artist tag could be an answer, but I do not want to enter incorrect information to tags.)
I suppose the underlying issue is that Plex is not recognizing your albums as single albums but a bunch of same-named albums from different artists/entities. Just consider how a media player will deal with all the “greatest hits” albums that are out there.
So if you have established those albums of yours through the embedded metadata. Think about adding 1 album artist per compilation. This could be a simple “Various Artists” (which Plex will properly deal with) or a fake entity like “[Movie XYZ] OST”. I’m not quite sure why you consider that “incorrect information” or “abusing” the album artist – that’s exactly what it’s intended to be used for…)
