Thanks for the explanation @ squaresmile: since the system was clearly omitting the track artist only when the latter was the main artist itself, I feared this was a planned behavior… But as stated by Havermans_Stef this isn’t an elegant solution and it may have some drawbacks.
If Plex really want to clean the interface omitting what is considered a “redundant information”, Plex should just hide this field from the album page with a script: I think that leaving it blank is really a bad practice…
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This behavior is inconsistent when a comma is found in the Artist field, for example:
Album: Friday Night in San Francisco
Release by Paco de Lucía, Al Di Meola & John McLaughlin
Obviously all the songs of this collaborative album should be credited (and searchable) using any of the following keywords: de Lucía, Di Meola and McLaughlin.
Now, that’s the metadata gathered by the new agent:
Results: since the artist field is left empty, all the songs of this album are only linked to de Lucía.
I know that at the moment Plex doesn’t index well collaborative albums crediting them only to the first artist (and that is already a well-known problem, see: New music Metadata agent doesn't like compilation albums or albums by multiple artists), but with this agent not only this album is credited to only one artist (de Lucía): it credits all the songs in it to this artist alone while it should show:
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This behavior leads to different search results from the one obtained with the old agent:
Album: 25
Release group by a‐ha
When you perform a search using A-ah as a keyword all the relevant artists and albums are shown as expected but, since the Artist field is blank for all the tracks… not a single song registered by the A-ha is shown:
Whit the old agent:
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Are we sure that all the third-party services relying on Plex metadata (e.g.: Sonos) will work as expected?
Are we sure this behavior is what we want? Isn’t it simpler to just fill the Artist field and then hide it from the interface (or better, create an option to let every users choose what they want to display)?
