How MusicBrainz represents its data has no bearing on usability. It is merely a database that gathers and holds as much data as possible. It is not used to interact with ones own music collection.
Go back to the original collection of LPs. I certainly don’t regret the loss of the vinyl LP, but albums had to be sorted in some way if you wanted to be able to find one and sorted by artist was an ideal way to do it. So you searched for the artist’s LPs, then for the exact album you wanted to play. There was no ability to view and search by track only artists.
I realise we have moved on, but there’s no getting away from the fact that a 600 item list is just about usable, but when it’s thousands of items long, it’s far less so. I used to have a car that could only deal with 500 artists in the list. It was bad enough losing just the 100 or so higher alphabetically artists, but include all the track artists and I would have access to only a fraction of my collection.
That is not the reason for my point of view, but it illustrates an actual practical problem.
I have to say I consider this requirement typical of modern thinking, just throw everything in together without care or thought, but it only works for small collections. Those with larger collections (and many have much larger than my meagre approx. 2000 albums) have to be able to successfully navigate the data and that requires more precise control of the data that is presented.
I am not alone in this and Apple themselves introduced the ‘Compilation’ flag to deal with the problem. Now you want to just throw every artist all in together? Madness. But you can do it iTunes if you want.
Since no-one is going to be on here asking for change when Plex already operates the correct way for them, I suspect there are more users who require it as it is, than those who believe they need to see every track artist in their artists list.
However, as I already said, I would have no objection if there was an option to do this, so we could all be happy. In fact it could be a simple option to prioritise either the AlbumArtist or track Artist (as indeed iTunes has). This would I believe satisfy both camps.
I’m not joking when I say that if Plex forced a ‘prioritise track Artist’ modus operandi on us, I would be forced to discard Plex and search for an alternative. It would be impossible for me (and I suspect others with larger collections) to continue with such an impossibly large artists list, the majority of which would be artists in which I have NO interest in considering in isolation.
I would however wholeheartedly support the ability to include an artists’ tracks from Various Artist compilations and also if Plex could successfully deal with multiple item tags, so multiple artists can be specified and with the relevant content then accessible under either artist. Also allowing an artist search to find any occurrence of the (track or Album)Artist name being searched for.
Here’s a thought. Currently Plex allows the user the view everything by Artist. If they renamed that to ‘Album Artist’ (which it actually is) and added a new view option of ‘Artist’ which displayed a list of all the track artists, that would instantly provide both ways of viewing, without needing to introduce any new settings option to choose which. Since they have the data required, this would not be hard to achieve and as I said, instantly satisfies all our requirements.
