As somebody with a large music library now added to my Plex server (I’ve set it up so Plex simply reads the backup of my iTunes library I’ve got stored on my NAS), I think this is a great new feature.
However, like many others have said, I’m really hoping Plex can find a way for users to quickly edit/overrule whatever groups the various albums, singles and compilations from my library are put into. I don’t have the inclination to log into musicbrainz, and just want to be able to tweak things within Plex.
An additional category for ‘rarities’ or misc other, would be useful too.
Not sure if this is intentional or will be changed, but under the EP/Singles album, the Artist name (Iceage in this example) is displayed and bold instead of the EP/Single title. I’m already on the Artists page, I shouldn’t be seeing the Artist name again. Much prefer to keep it consistent and display EP/Single title with year below.
Yeah, this is something I’ve noticed too. It should just say the name of the single / EP and the year of release.
Something I’ve noticed as well, which I’m sure is just a bug. But any band / artists that I have in my library with just a compilation or single etc has no gap between the title and image. See below for example on Deep Purple.
So is there some tag I can add or edit locally to get live albums/recordings to show up in the Live Albums section? I tried adding a MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMTYPE tag with the value “live” in foobar2000 but the live recording is still showing up under Albums.
Hopefully there is a more simplified way to change albums from Single/Ep, live and album on the way. I like the feature but a lot of my albums are mixed up.
Just to throw it out there, I’ve never been a fan of Plexamp. I much prefer the webapp, hopefully you guys keep supporting it for years to come.
Yes, potentially nice feature, but there needs to be a way of customising it. I want to have The Beatles’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and ‘Help!’ to appear in ‘Albums’ and not ‘Soundtracks’ for example. I understand why it is in ‘Soundtracks’ in MusicBrainz as strictly speaking it is correct.
I agree, a dedicated Bootleg tab would also be good, I have hundreds of them currently in there own library.
@elan@aubrey.wodonga@mr_mustard . I have a suggestion for this problem that can be sorted out quickly. I’m from Kenya where most artists (and in larger Africa) release singles as opposed to albums. Most of them and are not recognized globally so MusicBrainz is definitely not the way to go. For instance, from the image below, these are singles from this artist but are all classified as albums. It doesn’t make sense opening an entity called album to find a single song.
(Quick win). You guys have updated the movies library to allow guys input an extra identity after the filename such as -behindthescenes, -interview, -short etc.. You can do the same by allowing us to specify -single, -ep, -album, -remix, -live, -compilation etc.. after the music file or directory, then the scanner will pick that up.
(Quick win). Have option 1 but instead of renaming the file, read a file tag such as release type.
(Short term). Check if a directory has only one file, classify it under single If the directory has more than a user defined number, classify as EP or album etc. Just like one specifies collections in the movie library.
(Long Term). A feature that will greatly help to prevent most of your customer complaints is by generating an XML or JSON file on each movie/artist directory where someone can edit all the information they want. (Including adding lyrics and subtitles). This is to prevent future remote scans just incase someone loses their library or refreshes metadata. This will also reduce bandwidth on your side IMO. Put this as a Plex Pass feature and see your subscriptions go up.
Of course it is the way to go.
There is no reason at all to shy away from MB, just because it has currently predominantly western artists and music.
That changes fast, and the more diverse the list of contributors is, the better.
@OttoKerner , I understand u guys want your users to have the Plex Magically Does It moment so that’s why you prefer data scrapping. However, make it an option then so that for those who prefer local metadata, the scanner picks up what I’ve recommended above while for those who prefer automatic scrapping, let it fetch from musicbrainz. It’s not easy editing media info on MusicBrainz, plus it takes long for them to approve and sync with your servers. I added some entries last week. Till today, they are not reflected. Local editing is instantaneous.
I just updated my server version and this feature totally screwed up my music library lol. I have a massive Grateful Dead library - almost ALL of it live - and now everything is split up and all over the place. How do I fix it?? I don’t want to differentiate by “album type”.
I love the new feature as I am a very long-time user of MusicBrainz. Unfortunately, there is a bit of historic messiness that is interfering. There used to be one album type, not a primary and secondary one. One of those types was “live”. When they implemented the secondary type, all the ones that had been labelled as “live” before got assigned the “live” secondary type but didn’t get assigned a primary album type. It appears Plex is throwing everything that has a blank primary type into Albums. I think it would work a lot better if this was reconsidered for blank primary types. There is a lot of old data that is going to require clean-up for this to work properly for a lot of folks and while I encourage folks to do that it’s going to take some time.
I understand that change has been quite some time ago… so it’ll probably be easier to fix any remaining data gaps at their source (instead of starting glossing over the gaps inside Plex) – just my 2ct.
I did a quick look at the API and queried for release groups without a primarytype. There are 68,476 that don’t have one (although only 5370 are live ones). As I suspected, the issue would also show up with other types. Not arguing one way or the other, just stating the size of the problem set.
Is there any update on making this feature user editable? I’d love to use it if so and I think there’s a lot of potential there, but I’ve found the existing implementation with MusicBrainz pretty unworkable. I noticed tons of mistakes throughout my library, and I don’t want to wait for MusicBrainz to approve changes there to override them.
To be honest, what I love about Plex the most is being able to have total control of how my music library is organized, and I wish this feature allowed me to do that.
In the Artist view for an artist that has music categorized as Albums and music categorized as Single & EPs (and I assume Live Albums as well), in both the Web UI (Browser and Plex app), and Mobile UI (aka ios), the “Albums” section wraps to the screen width and adds rows vertically, but the Singles & EPs section scrolls horizontally in a single row.
Why the discrepancy? I would much prefer each of the “Album type” sections flow/wrap the same way the “Albums” section does.
