Right – I mean to vote for something more like this than non-numeric disk numbers. I’m experiencing the “collection” thing myself.
I picked up a couple of Multi-Disc Compilations/Collections at a thrift store. We’ll look at one.
When you tag this release properly from Musicbrainz point of view and apply the Plex Naming Convention, you get one big directory “The Studio Albums 1979-2008” and the tracks have Disc Ids 1 - 10, so you get
root@svr2:~# ls -la '/plex/PlexMusicLibrary/MainLibrary/Chicago/The Studio Albums 1979-2008'/
total 4030820
drwxrwsr-t+ 2 plex mediamanagers 12288 Oct 15 12:28 .
drwxrwsr-t+ 4 root mediamanagers 4096 Oct 15 12:28 ..
-rwxrw-r--+ 1 plex mediamanagers 67874622 Oct 15 10:23 '01-01 - Street Player.flac'
-rwxrw-r--+ 1 plex mediamanagers 30924267 Oct 15 10:23 '01-02 - Mama Take.flac'
-rwxrw-r--+ 1 plex mediamanagers 24023709 Oct 15 10:23 '01-03 - Must Have Been Crazy.flac'
...
-rwxrw-r--+ 1 plex mediamanagers 28308942 Oct 15 10:23 '02-01 - Manipulation.flac'
-rwxrw-r--+ 1 plex mediamanagers 25325326 Oct 15 10:23 '02-02 - Upon Arrival.flac'
-rwxrw-r--+ 1 plex mediamanagers 22653656 Oct 15 10:23 '02-03 - Song for You.flac'
...
-rwxrw-r--+ 1 plex mediamanagers 34735522 Oct 15 11:17 '10-15 - Stone of Sisyphus (no rhythm loop).flac'
If you look at it in the Plex player, it’s one big album, 131 tracks, and is broken up DISC 1 DISC 2 … DISC10. I get this. It’s fine as far as it goes.
Still, every track has embedded album art specific to the album it came from (they’re all the 2003 “expanded and remastered” releases if you’re wondering, repackaged into this collection).
If you look at the metadata tags, the individual tracks have a “Disc Subtitle” field filled-in.
Questions
I’d like a way to make this look in the player like ten separate albums with their correct titles and album art.
When I say “a way” here I mean “a straightforward way that doesn’t require tagging the release wrongly and rearranging the directory structure”. It would be fine to click into the album in the desktop/web UI and set switches – I get we can’t expect Plex to deal with everything entirely automagically.
As thing are, a Plex Release and a Musicbrainz Release aren’t quite the same thing, we can call it something else. A Musicbrainz Release might be a Compilation – maybe Plex adds a level above its current idea of a Release to deal with that. I don’t quite know how on-disk directory structures should look. But it’d sure be great to be able to map tags into a logical structure like this, even if I have to go into whatever Plex thinks is a multi-disc Release and tell it “No, this is a Compilation, get the disc titles from this tag and get the artwork like so”. It could still be in one big directory. I’d have to review artwork naming – we’d want something like"Disc Title - Cover [Large].jpg" so it could all live in one folder.
FWIW.