Organizing music - split albums (two artists on one album)

[RogerPodacter]

Server Version#: 1.20.2.3402
Player Version#: 4.44.2 - plex web version

With the release of PlexAmp, i have been spending a lot of time organizing my music to get it into a state where both Plex and I are happy with the results. Since i was not previously using much metadata, or even anything very heavy with naming conventions, i have a lot of work to do

One of the things I am struggling to figure out is how to deal with Split albums.

this was somewhat addressed here:

Artist name for a split album

yeah. I think it just boils down to plex lack of support for multiple artists (for both album artists, and track artists). I don’t think there is anything we can do about it on our end. I tend to put my split ep’s as ‘various artists’. In my ideal world, the album would show up equally in both artists lists, as the same release, with track artists populated.

but this thread has been closed. and it doesn’t look like there was a clear solution.

I also have a number of split albums where there are two artists each contributing some number of songs.

Can someone explain the proper way to organize these files in my library and/or tag them so that plex can organize everything properly?

Assuming these 3 albums…
Music/Artist1/AlbumFoo/tracks
Music/Artist2/AlbumBar/tracks
Music/Artist1_Artist2_Split/Split_Album/tracks
tags: Artist=either Artist1 or Artist2 as appropriate. Album=Split_Album.

i have found that if i…

• put the split album with one artist… and the split does not have Album Artist set…
  Music/Artist1/AlbumFoo/tracks
  Music/Artist1/Split_Album/tracks
  → plex is very not happy about this. it tends to create the artist as “Artist 1 / Artist 2” and puts both ‘Split_Album’ and ‘AlbumFoo’ under this artist…

• or, if i do this:
  Music/Artist1/AlbumFoo/tracks
  Music/Various Artists/Split_Album/tracks
  and give the Split Album the tags:
  Album Artist = “Artist 1 / Artist 2”
  → plex puts this album as a new artist: “Artist 1 / Artist 2”. that part is OK. however, if i search for “Artist 1”, it does not find any of Artist1’s tracks from the split album…
  searching for “Artist 1 / Artist 2” will find the album, but i think Plex should be able to find the split album when searching for “Artist 1”, maybe it shouldn’t display the tracks from Artist2, but certainly the ones from the artist i am searching for…

any guidance would be appreciated.

[TeknoJunky]

There hasn’t been any changes to plex music, so basically the problem is still ongoing with no good solution.

the best you can do is ensure your files are tagged according to musicbrainz, because that is what plex uses as ‘the facts’ about any content, and will always attempt to match to mbz, within the no-multi-artists constraint of plex itself.

[RogerPodacter]

thanks, i’ll try that first.

any ideas how to proceed when the data from Music Brainz is incorrect? or, at least, incorrect for my liking? I guess i’ll try editing it, not sure how that works…

[beckfield]

I have a “split” album which is a combination of a Smokey Robinson album and a Marvin Gaye album. There are tracks by Smokey alone, Smokey and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye alone, and Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell.

Searching for any of those artists (Smokey, Marvin, Miracles, or Tammi) in Plex Web - I don’t use PMP, so I don’t know what it would do - finds tracks from this album as well as their individual albums in my library.

My tags look like this (TPE1 is track artist, TPE2 is “Album Artist”):

As you found, Plex creates an artist named “Smokey Robinson / Marvin Gaye.”

Searching for “Marvin Gaye”:

I’m not sure what would prevent this from working. Hopefully this will provide some clues for you.

[RogerPodacter]

thanks, how do you have these albums laid out on disk?

i am getting weird results when i have a mix of split albums and non-split albums.

Example:
Neil Perry/Lineage/[tracks] – solo album
Neil Perry/04 Improv Jam 1 Take 1.mp3 – from a solo album, tags reflect this
Neil Perry/05 Improv Jam 2 Take 1.mp3 – from a split album, tags reflect this

here is what it looks like in plex:

the two singles tracks get merged into one album, and it is labeled as being split with both artists.
the same thing happened to the solo album(!)

here are the tags for the singles as well as one of the tracks from the solo album

i can only guess that plex does not like the singles files just dropped into the artist directory like that?
Neil Perry/Lineage/[tracks]
Neil Perry/[track] --> should be moved?
Neil Perry/[track2] --> should be moved?

i will try moving them to directories of each album name…

[RogerPodacter]

moving the two single tracks to subdirectories fixed that one.

I think my issue with the search was probably just a misunderstanding on my part.
When searching for Neil Perry, i see under the results, Artists: Neil Perry (2 albums)… which excludes the one with the split. However, i didn’t see the other track from the split from my test library (i do see it from my original library, with broken metadata). once i clicked on ‘search all sources’, i gave me a page showing the missing item in my test library. i’m sure once i have cleaned up my ‘real’ library it will be fine now. i hope.

i have another split album that required me to make changes in Music Brainz before i can continue with testing that one… so i’ll have to try again on that one later.

i’ll keep going through my split albums … hopefully the issues are more of the same like this - that i need to move the individual tracks into dirs for each album name.

[beckfield]

@RogerPodacter

thanks, how do you have these albums laid out on disk?

With my Library folder setting pointed to “Popular”:

Music
  Popular
    Rock
       Marvin Gaye
          What’s Going On
       Smokey Robinson
          One Heartbeat
    Various Artists
       Smokey Robinson & Marvin Gaye’s Greatest Hits
`

[d2freak]

You just make an account on MusicBrainz and edit what you want edited. But you must follow the guidelines and not just edit it in such a way that looks better in your eyes. Then, your edits will be on hold for 7 days while others can comment and vote on them. If nobody votes them down your edit will be approved.

Then, Plex has a cache, so it can take weeks or even a month before your changes shows up in Plex when you hit refresh. But - it’s the proper way and you’re helping everyone

[RogerPodacter]

thanks. i made the edit on musicbrainz. looks like someone imported it from discogs, which also has the same error. So, i edited both.
weird to me, since they both have images that show the proper track listing and numbering. seems weird that someone could have merged the first two tracks into one, but who knows. anyway, hopefully it will all straighten itself out now.

i haven’t had any more issues, i assume this will fix itself. i think we can call this one closed.
seems like the answer is - make sure your tracks/albums have good metadata!

i will probably have to bite the bullet and put everything i have through music brainz at some point… most of this is stuff that i ripped a loooooong time ago haha.

thanks for the help, everyone!

edit: just to be clear, circling back to my initial post, it doesn’t really matter which of the two options i use to organize the files on disk, so long as the metadata is good. oddly enough, music brainz didn’t ‘fix’ any of my metadata, just added a lot of their own music brainz tags, which is how i assume plex links them up nicely.

[d2freak]

@RogerPodacter

thanks. i made the edit on musicbrainz. looks like someone imported it from discogs, which also has the same error. So, i edited both.
weird to me, since they both have images that show the proper track listing and numbering. seems weird that someone could have merged the first two tracks into one, but who knows. anyway, hopefully it will all straighten itself out now.

Can I have the link to your edit? Just curious, and if it looks good I can vote it up (3 votes and it is approved immediately)

[RogerPodacter]

sure thing -
Here is a link to the album itself – https://musicbrainz.org/release/e857ac25-fc5f-4639-a76e-4e303eb04105
Here is a link to the open edits (just my edit)
https://musicbrainz.org/release/e857ac25-fc5f-4639-a76e-4e303eb04105/open_edits

The track list
A1 - Program-Output-File/Lorentz Transformations
A2 - Purely Chemical Measurements
should be…
A1 - Program > Output_File
A2 - Lorentz Transformations
A3 - Purely Chemical Measurements
as you can see in the images on the discogs page linked from music brainz.
to save you some time -

Mara'akate - 3-7-77

and the image itself…

[RogerPodacter]

thanks for the upvote, and finding out how it originally got labeled incorrectly! i was confused how the source images had it differently!

[RogerPodacter]

ok, so i ran into a case where the search doesn’t quite give me the results i’d want, and that is after getting the metadata sorted for these albums…
not sure if this is really a plex thing or not…
[ETA: this seems like it is different than what beckfield reported earlier in this thread. it would seem that what i want IS possible, but I must have something wrong here…]

In this case, i have:
Artist1\Album A
Artist1\Album B
Artist1\Album C
Artist1 & ArtistX\Shared Album (note, not a split, but a collaboration sort of thing)

When i search for Artist1, i see results like this:
Artists:
Artist1
Artist1 & ArtistX

Tracks:
a handful of tracks where this artist is featured from another artist

Albums:
Album A
Album B
Album C
**** but i DONT see ‘Shared Album’ here.

I’m guessing this is related to the whole ‘album artist’ business that others have had issues with? but at the same time, the tags for songs in this album do not actually have a list of Artists in there to separately list “Artist1” and “ArtistX”…

its a little weird that it shows the joint artist, but not the joint album?

Here are some screenshots with concrete examples:
— Search Results for ‘Flamingosis’ —

— The album that does not show up in the album list (the one that is for the shared artist) —
→ i feel like this one should have shown up in the list of albums in the search results above???

— the tags for the first track for the shared artist album —

[RogerPodacter]

somewhat off topic…since i got this fixed by adding more music brainz metadata…
but WOW does plex get unhappy if ANYTHING is not tagged properly! ok, maybe unhappy is not the right word, but this was such a subtle thing…

All of the data shown in plex looked fine, most likely because i have it set to prefer local metadata, and there is ‘enough’ tags in the file to populate what i thought was enough.
However, I couldn’t properly search for an artist AT ALL because ONE track was not in music brainz / tagged with music brainz tags.

• If i exclude this single from my library (start from empty library, add only the albums), i am able to search for the artist just fine --> “マクロスMACROSS 82-99” by searching for ‘macross’. it shows me the artist, the albums, etc.
• if i add this single at the same time i add the rest of the albums (starting from an empty library again)… the search results for ‘macross’ don’t find any results?!
• If i add all the albums first (from empty library), scan the library and pick them up, and then add the single… it works just fine.

so weird.

anywho, i added what i could to music brainz so hopefully no one else will have this issue too!
(https://musicbrainz.org/release/19857fbf-692d-4446-abde-5dde91da55fe)