Non-numerical labels for discs

Feature Suggestions
1

I have a pretty big library, and for some items, there are multi-part albums, such as Whitney Houston’s “The Thrown Down & the Cool Down” or Foo Fighter’s “In Your Honor” or Jars Of Clay’s “Furthermore”, as well as audiobook collections, such as Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth saga, or George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire sage (or The Expanse, or Mistborn, or various others).

For these, I’d like to keep the collections together. The ID3 tags don’t have standard Collection support, but they do give the ability to put alphanumeric characters into the discnumber field.

[Admin edit]: there are separate ID3 tags for a disc label.
It is a bad idea to misuse the ‘Disc Number’ tag for titles.
Let’s modify this request thread to allow for disc labels in general.
Which ID3 tag or Vorbis tag is responsible for the ‘disc title’ is an implementation detail and doesn’t matter too much for this feature request.

If Plex were to start supporting that, it would allow me to use discnumber for the book titles, and the Series name as the album, such as:
album = A Song of Ice and Fire
discnumber Book 1: A Game of Thrones
discnumber Book 2: A Clash of Kings
etc
or
album = Whitney Houston Greatest Hits
discnumber Disc One: The Throwdown
discnumber Disc Two: The Cooldown

All I ask is that you enable that in the discnumber field.

Cheers!

2

According to the ID3 specification, the disc number field (officially, the ‘Part of a Set’ frame (TPOS)) is defined as a numeric string, not alphanumeric.

TPOS
The ‘Part of a set’ frame is a numeric string that describes which
part of a set the audio came from. This frame is used if the source
described in the “TALB” frame is divided into several mediums, e.g. a
double CD. The value MAY be extended with a “/” character and a
numeric string containing the total number of parts in the set. E.g.
“1/2”.

1 Like
3

I don’t recommend doing that if you use these files in Plex.
There are discrete meta tags now for ‘Total # of discs / tracks’.

4

There is? I don’t see that in the ID3 spec. Do you know which tags?

5

Actually, looking at the ID3 specification, there is a frame intended for a subtitle for a disc within a set. The tag is ‘Set Subtitle’ (TSST).

So your set might look like this:

album (TALB) = A Song of Ice and Fire
discnumber (TPOS) = 1
SetSubtitle (TSST) = Book 1: A Game of Thrones
discnumber (TPOS) = 2
SetSubtitle (TSST) = Book 2: A Clash of Kings

Plex would have to implement support for TSST, so there is still a feature request here. Or maybe I should add it to the request for better ID3 support.

1 Like
6

Thanks for researching it a bit better. Happy to use whatever is best meant for that.

Also, I’m happy for this request to be considered better implementation for TSST (am I right to assume TSST is a child attribute of TPOS?).

Although if there’s already an attempt to better implement id3 in general, and you think this has a better chance of being picked up in the midst of that, I’m for that.

Or both.

7

There doesn’t seem to be a ‘parent/child’ relationship between ID3 frames, but these are certainly related to each other.

I added TSST to the list of necessary tags in the other request. I’d leave your request as-is for now. If a Ninja decides it’s redundant, they’ll let you know. Plex folk have alluded to upcoming improvements in this area, but who knows when, or how much improvement there will be.

8

At this stage I can’t vote, but support the idea. But I think it deserves deeper consideration and also applies to movies.

There are basically two types of “collections”. The type Plex supports is where for example 100 arias of Maria Callas could not fit on one CD, so they sold a box with 6 CD’s inside it, simply labelled CD1 - CD6.
In Plex, it is displayed correctly as one item, but there is no indication on the poster that it consists of 6 CD’s. Only when you start playing, you realise that it consists of 6 discs.

There is another type of collections where disks were sold separately, have their own sub-names and cover art, but definitely belong together. These should be handled and displayed similar to episodes in TV series. Or similar to folders and subfolders in Photos. You select the top poster, and on the next page you get all discs belonging to that collection displayed with their own posters.
This would not have to be done by the server automatically if no tags for that purpose exist - I guess people would be happy to do it manually.

I have a similar situation in movies. The Russian Bondarchuk’s War and Peace consists of 4 movies. They are listed on IMDB as separate movies, have their own names, but definitely are a collection, and should be viewed in a particular order.
Currently, I can only enter them as independent of one another. The problem there is the very long title. If you drop the common “War and Peace” part of the title, and only use the name of the individual movie, they will not appear next to one another on the page. If you do use the “War and Peace” words, then all four posters will show the same title, because there is no provision for wrap onto second line for long titles.
Good luck

9

Depending on the metadata source you use, they should be identified as part of a collection. TheMovieDB sees them as a group here: War and Peace Collection — The Movie Database (TMDB)

10

Beets uses the DISCSUBTITLE field to set the disc name, if one exists, in multi-disc collections. It would be very helpful if Plex Music could display this value instead of “Disc 1”, “Disc 2”, and so on when it displays multi-disc albums.

6 Likes
11

Agreed that this would be a great feature. A good example of a box set that would benefit is “30 Trips Around the Sun” by the Grateful Dead, which consists of 30 live shows spread over 80 discs. Instead of having them listed as Disc 1, Disc 2, Disc 3 … Disc 80 it would be great to have them use the “Disc Subtitle” field from MusicBrainz, which uses titles like “November 10, 1967 - Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, California - Disc 2”.

1 Like
12

I don’t know if the Plex folks are still paying attention to this one, but I would even be happy if I could just EDIT the disc name after the collection was added by the scanner. For me at least, this is uncommon enough that manual would be fine.

My example is “Classical Masterpieces of the Millennium”, which has 20 discs, each one a collection of works by a single composer. However, the artist listed for each track is the actual performer (usually orchestra) so it is very difficult to tell which is which without the disc names that were listed on the spines of all the CD jewel cases, e.g. “Disc 04 - Joseph Haydn” is so much better than “Disc 04”!

3 Likes
13

I just want to co-sign this - because Plex seems to hate the way I divide different named discs of a multi-disc album up into separate albums, it’d be great for Plex have the ability to use the DISCSUBTITLE tag or data from musicbrainz - preferably either/or - and display the name of the disc.

2 Likes
14

I know this is an old thread but I’d love for even just a manual edit option for disc names to be added. It’d really help with anthology sets such as Mute’s Erasure/Depeche Mode box sets where each disc is a different album.

1 Like
15

what about the implementation of the DISCSUBTITLE???

3 Likes
16

As a user of Plexamp, I’m hitting this tread again for Plex server to add support for the ‘DiscSubTitle’ tag. It seems like a pretty simple add to process one more tag at the point where the hardcoded disc label (‘DISC n’) is being generated using the ‘DiscNumber’ and ‘TotalDiscs’ tags. But I’m sure every little coding priority add up…

2 Likes
17

This should be indeed any rather easy fix with a lot of ‘quality of life’ improvement. I just mentioned it in another reddit comment. So maybe that may give it it’s needed push.

1 Like
18

Thank you, jesperplexter, for the reddit post link!
I’m just switching over to Plex for my music collection and hope that Plex adds support for Disc titles ASAP!

1 Like
19

Adding my vote, as I have numerous box sets—mostly CDs for me—where the individual Discs have names, be they album titles or themes or topics or whatever.

I’m not 100% sure if DISCTITLE support works for my use case though. I wonder if there may also be some unanswered implementation detail questions leading to a delay in addressing this feature request? Plex devs probably don’t want to break existing functionality, and certainly not any well-worn use cases (even if they can be deprecated/reworked; that would be a headache with a looming deadline for end-users). I suspect they’d rather not complicate the info architecture on the back-end either. Hmm.

Since directory structure is often cited in media organization, what if we had the following?

Here I’m solely using directory/file naming conventions. I haven’t yet envisioned what it truly means to use DISCTITLE, and for all I know that still might be the way to go here. I’m just thinking out loud and trying to draw a bead on things for myself.

First the example, then I’ll discuss.

Jethro Tull
└── 20 Years of Jethro Tull
    ├── 001 The Radio Archives and Rare Tracks
    │   ├── 101 Song for Jeffrey.flac
    │   ├── 102 Love Story.flac
    . . .
    │   └── 125 Sunshine Day.flac
    ├── 002 Flawed Gems and the Other Sides of Tull
    │   ├── 201 Lick Your Fingers Clean.flac
    │   ├── 202 The Chateau dIsaster Tapes Scenario Audition No Rehearsal.flac
    . . .
    │   └── 219 Nursie.flac
    └── 003 The Essential Tull
        ├── 301 Witchs Promise.flac
        ├── 302 Bungle in the Jungle.flac
        . . .
        └── 318 Locomotive Breath.flac

Nothing earth shattering here, I know, but naming conventions matter! You don’t want to break past/expected behavior if you can help it.

Plex uses Music/ArtistName/AlbumName/TrackNumber - TrackName.ext. I’m proposing this additional acceptable pattern: Music/ArtistName/AlbumName/DiscNumber - DiscName/TrackNumber - TrackName.ext. I’m hoping that both of these patterns could co-exist. The more specific one could be checked for first. (Crossing fingers.)

An Album would now support two or more optional Disc directories. They’d get a number and a name just like Track filenames do. (I’m hard pressed to imagine any deeper levels, but feel free to point out if such a multi-box-set creation exists!)

If TrackNumber includes a Disc Number, as it likely would in existing cases, I am thinking DiscNumber takes precedence. That should allow for graceful migration of albums to and from different library structures.

A Track appearing within an Album directory that also contains Disc directories should probably be… ignored, I think?

If Extras are supported for Music (forgetting at the moment) they’d still be added in the usual ways… though I admit I haven’t thought this part through. Plus you now have the Disc level and thus the prospect of adding an extra at the Album vs Disc scope.

I could also imagine a new Plex option to revert to the previous behaviour: “Show Discs As Individual Albums”.

That’s all I got for now. Feel free to poke holes in this or discuss how those holes might be patched up.

1 Like
20

This would be really helpful. I have box set collections containing albums with similar track listings, and being able to title a disc "Live in Paris 1979” for example would be a big quality of life improvement.