Music Metadata issue

General Discussions
1

I have multiple folders of singles that have “Title” and “Artist” metadata along with an embedded thumbnail. The “Album” and “Album Artist” fields are blank as they are not part of an album.

However each track shows up as a separate album in the Albums page, is there anyway to prevent this?

Note: In Plex, I have the library set to “Prefer Local Metadata”.

2

In other words, how can I assign metadata for songs in a directory so that the Album Artist is labeled as “Various Artists” and the Album is named after the folder, all while retaining the existing local track metadata?

3

You cannot.

If you want the tracks to appear under Various Artists, you need to tag them with an AlbumArtist of “Various Artists”.
You need to tag them with an Album Title of the title of the single release.

4

You cannot.

If you want the tracks to appear under Various Artists, you need to tag them with an AlbumArtist of “Various Artists”.
You need to tag them with an Album Title of the title of the single release.

So if I tag them outside Plex with AlbumArtist set to “Various Artists” and Album set to “Mixed Album”, will that work?

5

That would drag all those single tracks into one common album.
Which is not recommended, because they would share their album art.
And doing so will also render the loudness analysis almost useless, since these tracks never were mastered together.

6

Which would be fine as it would be a mixed album.

.

Even if each single has its own artist, title and embedded image?

Doing it this way would prevent each single from appearing as a unique album, but how would the artists be handled?

7

Yes.

They wouldn’t appear in the list of artists at all. (Unless you have other albums from them where they are listed as AlbumArtist)

8

@OttoKerner

Ok, thanks for the info

9

Side Note: What is the recommended method to deal with singles?

10

They are “releases”, just like albums.
Treat them exactly the same. Tag them with AlbumTitle, Album Artist, track numbers. Store them in the same folder structure.

/Music <-- folder which has been added to the Plex library
   /AlbumArtist
      /AlbumTitle (or more precisely: "Release Title")
          01 - Song Title.mp3
          02 - Song Title.mp3
          03 - Song Title.mp3
          ...

If a single is not listed at Musicbrainz.org, you can embed special meta tags to force them to be listed under Singles and EPs in plex. Plex Media Server 1.27.2.5929 - support for release type embedded tags - #33 by certuna

You can also embed the Musicbrainz ID number as a meta tag to force a match with a certain release on MB.

11

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