WELCOME TO ANIMAL CROSSING™: YOUR FAVORITE SONGS - (ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK)
I decided to translate the title to American English by removing the “u” in “FAVOURITE” since, in my opinion, this is proper. Also, in order for the title to have some consistency, I decided to capitalize everything.
This is a joke, by the way.
I disagree with your edit. I expressed earlier that I do not like weird unicode such as ™.
Here are my interpretations of some outdated and vague documented policies:
Until you publish an interview with the artists and they all agree that your title is correct, you will simply have to accept my…
Might I add that you cannot interview just anyone at Nintendo. A company response does not count as Artist Intent, rather that would be marketing intent. Enjoy waiting 10 days for the edit voting period to conclude and fail. Watch it sit there and mock you. You should just cancel the edit and move along.
I am now powerful. I am the best.
Fun Fact:
The (3) metadata providers that I linked to earlier cannot agree on how many artists are responsible for this release. I wonder if anyone caught that. No love for those bonus tracks, taken from an entirely different OST. If anyone is up to the challenge, go ahead and edit the MusicBrainz entry, wait a week, and hope that no user opinions creep up.
The level of pedantry being shown here is ridiculous. Who cares if it’s upper case or not?
Do you listen to ac/dc?
Also, that was a loaded question given that I obviously do care.
MusicBrainz and Discogs each have their own conventions for how they want titles entered in their database (emphasize their, as in “not yours”), and guidelines explaining those conventions. Those guidelines, along with the voting process in MB’s case, help to greatly reduce the overwhelming amount of garbage that plagued older services like CDDB, which allowed anyone to enter anything they like with little or no oversight.
Plex used to rely on GraceNote, which took over CDDB in 2000. GraceNote put a stop to user editing, but they never seemed to get very far in cleaning up the garbage. Today, MusicBrainz is a far more accurate and reliable database than GraceNote, Last.FM, and, in my experience, even Discogs, thanks in large part to their defined style guidelines and voting process.
If the rigor of following guidelines and properly justifying edits is so overwhelming that some can’t take it and quit, I’m okay with that. The ones that stay, heed the advice of others, and learn how the database works are the ones who will end up making valuable contributions. If it sends the rest off to rant and tantrum about it in other forums, well, that’s a vanishingly small price to pay, in my opinion.
Your explanation is sound. The arguments made within this thread are not about how to control nor influence metadata trackers. Rather, I am highlighting how their standards, guidelines, opinions are subjective. The reasons behind those decisions are their own, not a universal truth.
This thread was designed to request a feature that decouples an important metadata tag from MusicBrainz. We should have the ability to separate our opinions. You and I only met because that separation does not exist. Plex and its community offered editing MusicBrainz as the only solution to this negative experience. Note how many other Plex Pass users share this struggle.
@beckfield - Your vote can help keep those agreeable to you nearby, and those who are not elsewhere. The deployment of this feature is a win for the both of us. We are counting on your support. I thank you for taking the time to post your thoughts.
Chiming in to voice my support for this feature. Here’s a perfect example.
The Beatles’ 50th anniversary remixes (Sgt. Pepper, White Album, Abbey Road, Let It Be) can’t be updated in MusicBrainz to have the “Remix” type because they are under the release groups for their original albums. So they can’t be categorized as remixes even though that’s the whole point of those releases.
Another example is Tron Legacy Reconfigured by Daft Punk (…not actually but still). It’s listed as a separate release from the OST, but it has two secondary tags (Soundtrack, Remix). Plex has filed it under Soundtrack even though I think it’s more appropriate to consider it a Remix.
I saw in the (Plex pass updates?) release notes of the Plex server that the release type could be read from the musicbrainz releasetype ID3 tag.
Good catch!
I think you were looking at this post.
I selected a problematic release to performing testing against. The files it contained are FLAC, so ID3 tags should not be present within them, and they were not. I was able to manually change the album release type, but only after removing the album from Plex and readding it with the new “Release Type” tag value. The process is bothersome, but it works.
Adding some context. Mac Miller is a famous hip hop artist who has tons of single, free-styles, collabs, live performances, etc. A lot of this media is not on the online agent, and I have to sort it manually anyway.
Yes please, alot of upcoming artists release singles without albums… would be nice if I could manually mark something as a single.
Hey, mate!
I’m having quite a challenging time sorting my library out too, especially with this option on.
How were you able to apply said tag? Any directions you could give me to get started? Thanks in advance.
Yeah, the manual process to perform an edit can be troublesome for sure.
The appropriate Tag to modify is “Release Type”:
As you can see from the image above, the Release Type Tag accepts multiple values. Plex will use programmed logic to determine which value to focus on. The pictured example will be classified as a Soundtrack.
In order to modify the Release Type Tag, a specialized tag editor program is required. Most influential tags will not appear within an Operating System properties editor, the Release Type Tag included.
I recommend using MusicBrainz Picard (docs).
The MusicBrainz platform is truly useful and Picard is a wonderfully made program. Despite the negativity I threw at MusicBrainz in previous posts, the solution is of the highest quality and its leadership cares about developing a tool that helps people. With that said, there will be hiccups if you dive into editing as some fields are still near impossible to modify without using the voting system. Even Picard will reject the local modification of certain values, such as the Length Tag.
Here is a link to the MusicBrainz Picard Quick Start documentation.
Don’t be nervous, the Picard editing process is streamlined and more simplified than others. Just be sure to backup the files you are editing to avoid problematic and irreversible modifications. The most common problem I experienced is Picard identifying my release as another “version”, introducing differences in track ordering and Length Tag values.
Good luck and be sure to let us know how it goes! 
So I gave Picard a try and it did absolutely nothing. I have a fan-compilation EP (4 tracks) of Alice In Chains that Plex just sets as an Album… even though it’s an EP. So I followed your steps and downloaded Picard. Because I had to do this manually (I’m not adding a fan comp to Musicbrainz), I added the Release Type tag, and tried “album; EP”, “EP”, and “Single”.
Plex still sorted it as an album.
The inability to manually edit the release type is ■■■■■■■ insane and Plex needs to ■■■■■■■ fix this.
Sorry for my language but I want to be able to categorize fan comps and other things not on Musicbrainz to the proper release type, rather than having them default to “album”.
Honestly, everyone’s effort should pause until Plex allows a SIMPLE override and allows us to FIX and APPLY our very own. It’s no freakin different when loads of my bootlegs and white labels come up as UNMATCHED. I rather have them scanned as UNMATCHED than have to manually edit a Picard entry ORRRRRR at the bare minimum allow Plex to find specified labels within the Album Titles such as EP or [EP], [White Label], when scanned to automatically override its own algorithm. It’s absurd yet again that Plex fails to think about its end user. I too don’t have all darn day and night to input my entires onto a website. Just allow a scannable override when using specific keywords in the album title. How hard is that? Ohhhhh, wait… this is Plex we’re talking about.
Yeah, I agree with you all. It’s about time Plex allowed us to just edit our OWN library the way we desire to do so.
You all make strong points. Thank you @jimmyRRpage_gmail_com for highlighting the steep learning curve involved with the manual edit process.
There are many reasons why Plex would not accept a Release Type edit. It would take a while to go over the possibilities of what went wrong and how to correct the issue. I can confirm that I was able to resolve every issue that I ran into so far, but that does not mean the solutions were simple. In addition, subject matter experts mostly remain silent or missing. Who can blame them, though? Time is a precious and severely limited resource.
MusicBrainz enthusiasts fail to mention just how much volunteer work their platform needs. They downplay the work effort required to resolve unique problems that appear almost daily.
I continue to fight for a functional music library. I made a new account on MusicBrainz; I learned the hard way that the account requirement is inescapable. I found new ways to push my edits through the system. For the data purists, I take pride that my edits are genuine and represent fact. I find it disheartening that “playing chess” is required to contribute value on MusicBrainz.
In my new life on MusicBrainz and within 6 weeks, I pushed 192 edits, passed 48 votes, added 13 releases and 8 artists. Edits were required as most releases I add to Plex have large gaps or misinformation in their MusicBrainz database entry. I am also the reason why the Picard pre-gap bug was marked for correction. My contributions will go unnoticed, but at least my files contain proper tag values. I could perform better, but the idea that this is the current best solution is difficult to process, while the work is thankless and exhausting.
You can help support the manual Release Type edit request by taking these actions:
We need Plex to facilitate the local modification of the Release Type value.
Plex Staff, are you paying attention? We need your understanding.
MusicBrainz enthusiasts, could you spare us empathy? We need your understanding as well.
I can’t even think about actually using the “group by” feature until I can just edit it manually. I’ve disabled it and chances are it’s gonna stay that way, given how old this issue is.
It should just be a local field for the Album. It can still pull from Musicbrainz to set the default, but not being able to change it is just kinda silly, and heavily increases the amount of effort you need to put in just to make it look how you want it to. And then another user can just come in and change it anyway…
As it stands, It’s just way easier to keep the grouping feature disabled. I have a 2nd Library for Soundtracks, and I don’t care about the difference between an LP and EP. So it works out pretty well for me.
This feature is needed and would be very welcome since the MusicBrainz functionality is unable to be used by Plex. The Release type in MB seams to be completely disregarded or applied randomly to the Plex database. I for one would welcome this feature. Thank you.
Just adding my voice to saying this needs to be implemented.
Just one of many examples: https://musicbrainz.org/release/3c5b65b4-1837-4016-a479-7778f6047421
That is listed as a single in musicbrainz but still lists as an album in plex and there is no way to change it. I think pulling by default from musicbrainz is a good idea, without some way to manually correct any mistakes in the matching algorithm, it leaves us feeling like we have no control over our own library, which is one of the main points of using a service like Plex.
