Plex Music, Alexa & Artist Tags

[dawieg]

I don’t know if this is an Alexa thing or a Plex skill thing, but when I ask Alexa to play music from my Plex server, she responds with “Playing song title by album artist” instead of by artist. This is an issue because on compilation albums, the Album Artist tag is the unhelpful “Various Artists”, whereas the “Artist” tag contains the actual artist name that I want. This is even more annoying when I play music through my car’s bluetooth, and on the dash displays whatever Artist info the current app is passing to it, which in this case is simply “Various Artists.”

When I play that same track directly through Plexamp or the regular Plex app, the expected Artist tag is passed through bluetooth to my car’s display just fine. So, again, I don’t know if this is actually a Plex (skill?) issue, or if it’s Alexa that’s choosing what tags to read and pass through, and which tags to ignore.

Does anyone have any insight? Or possible workaround? I’m willing to re-tag my MP3s if there’s a way to get the results I’m looking for, as long as it wouldn’t mess up my music’s organization in other Plex players.

[dawieg]

Another observation… If I tell Alexa to "Ask Plex to play music by artist " and that artist isn’t contained in any Album Artist tags, she’ll respond that no music by that artist can be found on my Plex server. But if I search for that same artist directly in Plex or PlexAmp, I’ll get a list of songs that have that artist listed in the Artist tag, regardless of what’s in the Album Artist tag (which in this example would be “Various Artists” because the tracks are from compilation albums.

So it appears that either Alexa is only searching for Album Artists instead of Artists… or that Plex is only returning results based on Album Artist and not Artist. Why is this? Is it possible to change this behavior? Thanks…