I am heartily glad to weigh in here. I have some suggestions for Plex, and suggestions to solve some of the problems people are having with multi-disk or especially multi-artist albums.
First, I confess I never used MusicBrainz. But I use MP3Tag. It can update tags as a batch process–select the files you want to re-tag, specify the tag(s) you want to change, and click the floppy-disk icon to save. But what you really need to know is that MP3Tag lets you set a number of tags that can solve the problems some people are having.
Understand this: the Artist tag is not the only tag you can use, or that Plex will recognize, for a recording artist. “Artist” means track artist, or the one who performed the music, or delivered the reading, of a particular track. In any compilation, use the “Album Artist” tag, and specify “Various Artists.” That way, Plex will index everything in one album, under an “artist” called Various Artists.
For non-compilation albums, Artist is the name of the artist and his band as the cover art lists them. Album Artist is how you would look up that artist in a record or CD store.
When Plex indexes everything, it lists each Artist with each track, and lists the Album Artist (if present) as the overall artist next to the album title.
Also–and very important for multi-disc albums: be sure to tag your tracks consecutively in an overall play order that goes across all your discs. Then select all tracks on each disk you have, and use the Discnumber tag to specify which disk held the track. Plex will then list all your tracks, grouped by disc.
With that said, Plex does not use all the tags that conform to the IDv3 standard. And it should! Specifically, Plex flat-out ignores the following tags, which a user or friend should be able to search on:
- Composer
- Movement (as “1st Movement”, “2nd Movement,” etc.)
- Movement Name (as “Allegro”, “Allegro Vivace”, “Scherzo,” “Andante lamentoso,” or–in the case of a member of a suite–names like “Morning Mood” and “In the Hall of the Mountain King”)
- Conductor
All that Plex uses are the tags Title, Artist, Album Artist (if specified), Album Name, Track Number, Disc Number (see above), Genre, and Year (of release).
To give you an example: say you have a track with Oscar Levant playing George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the Philly Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy conducting. You would tag this (using MP3Tag) thus:
Composer = George Gershwin
Title = Rhapsody in Blue
Artist = Oscar Levant and the Philadelphia Orchestra
Conductor = Eugene Ormandy
Plex should then list this as:
George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue
Oscar Levant and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy conducting
The way Plex does things now, you have to write a ridiculously long title that would look like:
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 in B Minor (“Pathetique”), 3rd Movement: Allegro Vivace
and give the artist as
The Berlin Symphony Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan, conductor
Why not instead break things out using the Composer, Movement, Movement Name and Conductor tags?
(Frankly I would love to specify Soloist and Solo Role as separate tags. But that’s not according to IDv3 standard, and I’m not going to suggest that Plex break standard in this area.)
Therewith my suggestions, both as a new build and o solve a few immediate problems people are having (and that I once had!) with album organization and sortation.
