Server Version#: Version 4.87.2 (deb package: 1.29.0.6244-819d3678c), Ubuntu server
My default music sort is by Artist. I expect to see all the songs and albums that include the selected artist but I don’t.
For example I have an Alison Krauss album and also the O’ Brother Where Art Tho soundtrack which includes a couple songs by her, but they are not listed under her as the artist. To hear those, I have to go to Various Artists and select the album.
Is there a way to tag these types of songs so they appear both under the Album name but also when you choose the Artist? It seems to me this is how it should work. There are certainly enough tag fields to make this happen so I assume I’m doing something wrong.
To be more clear; I would expect to see “Down to the River to Pray” both in the Alison Krauss Artist screen and also in the Album under Various Artists.
I generally use MusizBrainz Picard to tag my albums and does does a pretty good job if the album is in the database, but if I need to manually adjust tags to make this work, I will.
While not a solution I’ll offer you a potential workaround.
You can use plexamp. When you go to an artist like your example it’ll give you a section titled Appears On... which will lists other albums the artist has tracks in.
This is, unfortunately, a long-time shortcoming in Plex, and the subject of several feature requests. This one has the most votes.
Plexamp is the first Plex app to show the “Appears On…” feature. Hopefully the other apps will soon follow, but Plex can be very slow about such things.
Parity and general consistency across plex clients is a major annoyance. There are so many examples of stuff which works one way in one client and then completely different in another.
IMO, They really need a One UI overall designer to align their features better. Feels like a scrum free for all with each team doing their own thing …
It occurred to me there’s another instance where Plex music fails to display what I want - Songs with multiple artists. I also have a few songs that are Alison Krauss and Robert Plant and some that are Alison Krauss and Union Station (a band she recorded with). If I left the tags alone, I’d have FOUR different places to click to hear all of Alison Krauss in my collection - Her, the 2 above, PLUS “Oh Brother” soundtrack.
What I have to do is decide which artist I want the songs to appear under and then modify the tags. This is much less than optimal and frankly. very poor is probably not too strong of a description.
I took a look at some of the raw database yesterday. It seems like it could be done to me. I’m pretty familiar with postgres but sqlite not so much.
It seems they store the tags in a single table with only an ID and the tag; “fts4_tag_titles”. Mine is 118421 rows long. Then they reference these tags elsewhere. This is why the current clients can’t do what I want. There’s no ability to reference multiple artists tags the way they are doing it now. It seems they just followed the MP3 tagging scheme without thinking about going beyond the abilities of the tags.
I’m thinking you could have a table with all the artists (rather than just tag data) and store the artists info globbed together like they do genre. Genres are stored like this in a single field in a different table: “Country|Comedy”. I think you could pick some reasonable number - lets say 6 - and allow 6 different artists to be assigned to one song. The software could easily convert typical blended tags for multiple artists - A and B, A, B, A & B, etc. - into up to 6 artist fields in a table.
Actually, I believe they are already doing something like this with Movie Actors. You can click on an Actor’s picture and all the moves with that actor appear magically. Why not music?
If Plex would’ve followed the MP3 tagging scheme, we wouldn’t be in this mess - all current tagging standards (id3v2.4, MP4, Vorbis comments) support multiple values for Artist and Album Artist. Players like Kodi, Emby, Jellyfin etc do support this, so it’s frustrating that Plex doesn’t.
The Genre thing Pop|Rock works because those are all in one text field, but as any DB engineer will tell you, storing multiple values that way is a very ugly hack
Artists are different in Plex: Album Artists have their own records with their own ID, Track Artist is just a text string in another field. There’s no easy way to link those together.
I agree that multiple Track Artists could probably be possible in Plex by storing them as Alice|Bob, however multiple Album Artists are not possible (the artist-album-track relationship is set up so an album has only one parent ID).
It would probably be too confusing for users to explain that multiple album artists are not possible, multiple track artists are possible, but only cosmetically, since it’s not possible to link album artists and track artists and combine them in search/filters.
BTW the actors thing is relatively easy to implement because there’s only one type of relation there: movies - actors. With music there’s two: albums - artists and tracks - artists, and they’re both stored completely differently.
