Plex doesn’t read the TCMP flag. That is a specialty of iTunes.
The release year is a property of the album in Plex. i.e. there is only one release year for an album.
not quite, there is only one ORIGINAL release date, but there are remasters and re-releases which have subsequent years for the same album, possibly with different tracks, or the same.
Handling of ‘Original release date’ is still in development.
As is handling of different versions of the same album. It is still undecided how to handle these.
Just out of curiosity.
I long since shied away from Plex for my music library. I don’t recall the exact reason but I have a feeling it was because if I had a 25th anniverary version of an original 1980 album it would show as a 2005 release.
I know for the purists who have 5 versions of the same album it was a must. Personally it annoyed me to hell. If I wanted to listen to an artist from their first to last album I only ever wanted to do it by original release date and not according to if I owned the original release or some later re-issue.
Right now music in Plex is just great and works exactly like that. Maybe my memory betrays me or more likely I was just doing it wrong back in the day.
I also have several versions of albums. Plex still cannot handle versions of album, so it may have the wrong release date if you rely on the online metadata.
However, since my music (at least those artists I care about) has pretty good meta tags, I simply switched to ‘Prefer local metadata’.
This will use the release date straight from your files. That way Plex can also handle different versions of an album.
Example for Mr Collins:
Original versions at the bottom, with original release year.
Deluxe versions with second disc and “updated cover” above.
So that suggests that back in the day i was using ‘Prefer local metadata’. ?
Since all the music updates I have been ripping more of my old CD’s many of which are much later re-issues.
Yet despite that every album here is shown by original release date. (exactly what I wanted).
So should/would this have always been the case assuming I wasn’t using ‘Prefer local metadata’. ?
Every artist from the Beatles to Peter Gabriel to Iron Maiden appear in original release date order totally ignoring all the re-issue dates. (Again that’s perfect for me)
I just don’t recall that being the case last time I used music in Plex?
It does handle them, you have to rename the Album Name of the reissue, for example “Thriller (40th anniversary edition)” or something, and keep the original year. Sorting will work just fine then.
The inability to handle albums with tracks from different years is trickier, as it really screws up filtering by year. You don’t really want old Phil’s hits showing up when you’re looking for pop songs from 2016. Same goes for compilation albums with songs in totally different genres.
Supporting two date fields for release year (which is just for display purposes) and original release year (used for filtering by year/decade/etc) would be the solution but Plex isn’t there yet.
Once that’s implemented though, handling multiple versions would be fairly easy, if there’s an album with the same Album Artist and Album Name, but different Release Year, you can consider them versions.
It’s a real shame that Plex doesn’t support the TCMP tag, as iTunes is one of the few music libraries that handles V/A compilations correctly and is reliably able to group them as a separate category.
Hello, is it possible to solve the problem 2 with collaboration/split albums to match the each artist? In your example it should be matched to both Leon Russel and Elton John discographies. Your don’t need to have a separate Leon Russel/Elton John discography.
As of now, collaborations are only assigned to the first artist.
There was a long standing bug regarding ordering by release date, which was fixed a few months ago. Maybe that was it.
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I, too, have several collaboration albums, like this: https://musicbrainz.org/release/176c27da-ef41-47c8-b753-99fb39e30452
I currently have this tagged with “Adam Skorupa & Krzysztof Wierzynkiewicz” as the album artist, but that is not working with the new scanner. Hopefully a solution will come eventually.
I’m currently just sticking with the last.fm match for these kind of releases, as they have a proper match for most of them.
Update 1.18.0.1913 has completely stuffed my music library. All of my music is tagged correctly and i want plex to use local tags over cloud. The cloud works great for albums that consist of one artist but is absolutely crap at compilations. I have a ton of compilations and after the update the artist field now just says various artist and plex refuse to use local media assets. This is really annoying and needs to be fixed plex should praise the local meta data by default and if you want top use the shity cloud you should have to select it manually per album basis.
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The new Music library is horrible. The new agent is shooting up a lot of artists and albums for me. Albums are suddenly divided into CDs, Various Artists becomes another artist.
And before anyone comes to me: YES, I have activated “Prefer local metadata”!
The update is a disaster … let me decide for myself how I want my titles, albums and artists displayed!
Not sure what you mean by that.
But most likely, your files are tagged like so: The ‘Album title’ meta tag contains the album title itself, plus the information which (disc) it is. This is simply wrong.
All tracks in this album should have identical content in the Album title metatag. The disc number belongs into a separate tag.
This can happen, if you have albums with differing ‘album artists’ within one album.
Or albums without ‘Album Artist’ tagged, but differing ‘track artists’.
Or you have tracks tagged with different ‘album artists’ within the same folder.
Rule #1:
Always have your music organised in a folder structure like so:
Music > Album Artist > Album Title > Tracks
Rule #2:
For albums to be “kept together”, all tracks must be tagged with identical content in the ‘Album Artist’ and ‘Album Title’ metatags.
Make sure Track numbers and disc numbers are tagged as well.
Rule #3:
Folders named by some arbitrary criteria, full of diverse, mixed artist tracks won’t work.
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No, I never set the disc number. Not in album title nor as tag. I don’t need this function. I don’t write anything in the tag “Disc number”.
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I double-checked it: All albums in the Various Artists folder are tagged with the AlbumArtist tag “Various Artists”. Each album folder has the same name as the album tag.
You will only need it for multi-disc albums.
I am talking about albums which are not in the Various Artists folder. Those get attributed to VA under the circumstances I described. Which then in turn can overwrite the whole VA “artist” with different artist info.
All albums are one-disc tagged.
There is no album with VA as AlbumArtist outside the “Various Artists”-Folder … I think there is a bug inside the Agent or Scanner.
Plex will assign albums to VA, if they fulfill one of the conditions I mentioned above.
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Thank you! I’ll look through my collection again.
Another question: If I change the metatags of my MP3s, do I have to do a PlexDance with the new scanner/agent?
Thankfully not. The new music code made the dance completely obsolete.
