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Many of my song titles use right quotes, for example: You’ll Be Back
However, when trying to search for this song, if I type You'll Be Back, it does not return the song. I assume this is an issue for left quotes and double right and left quotes as well.
I can manually fix the metadata within Plex, but I feel like this should be handled by Plex and mapped to appropriate characters when searching.
There is a fix in the works for search with punctuation and non english alphabets, upper vs lower case and other things that makes one shake their fist in the air when results not found. Currently in early alpha testing.
Perfect. Thanks for the quick reply!
Inspite of the new feature, I personally think it is wrong to use a right single quote in place of an apostrophe. These are totally different symbols with different meanings.
This is true, however, more than a trivial amount of songs/artists get automatically tagged from external sources with right quotes. In these cases it is nearly impossible to quickly use the search function without overriding each instance individually.
Can you give me an example of where you saw the source using a single quote? I don’t know I’ve ever seen one myself. I’d like to see who’s being a trouble making and putting these in.
Sure! The most recent one I’ve come across is the Hamilton Soundtrack which is matching against MusicBrainz: https://musicbrainz.org/release/2eece058-39a8-4dd7-af54-b94ae39ec7fa
You can see all the titles are using quotes instead of apostrophes
You’ll Be Back
A Winter’s Ball
What’d I Miss
It’s Quiet Uptown
It appears that the digital release is using apostrophes, but obviously that’s not a proper match.
Ugh. Looks like whoever entered that into Musicbrainz decided to use the right quotes.
I unfortunately found this in the MusicBrainz style wiki:
Use of basic ASCII punctuation characters such as ' and " is allowed, but typographically-correct punctuation (such as ’ for the English apostrophe) is preferred.
So it appears that this issue won’t be going away any time soon.
Well that’s just stupid. I don’t know in other languages, but in English, the slant is added by the font style. There is no such thing as an actual slanted apostrophe even in unicode, only the single quote U+0219. Someone over there needs to be yelled at.
If they wanted slanted apostrophes, they should have used a font that supports its.
I think U+2019 is appropriate here - at least, I don’t think it’s stupid.
Obviously U+0027 wouldn’t be wrong and would guarantee compatibility. But I don’t think it’s “more right” than U+2019.
The Apostrophe (and Right Single Quotation Mark) character should be shaped and hinted for spacing, not just slanted, so U+0027 with a different display font isn’t a complete solution. U+0027 is “neutral” or “vertical” and considered a “Typewriter” apostrophe.
In typography the Apostrophe and Right Single Quotation Mark are usually equivalent. Most importantly, Unicode specifically recommends U+2019 for Apostrophe.
At least they aren’t backticks or graves or acutes or HTML-encoded or something else horrible. There were some dark periods of pre-Unicode computer “typography”.
My favorite way to get Unicode zealots riled up is to ask “What about U+02BC?”
(Edit: I’m a little surprised to see that Apple Music/iTunes uses ASCII quotes/apostrophes. Kinda figured they’d use curly ones. A rare nod to compatibility?)
Similarly, in the Plex App for Windows at least, any punctuation difference will cause the same song from different albums to show up twice in an artist’s “Popular Tracks” list. For example, the song “She’s Got You” by Patsy Cline gets tagged by the Plex Music scanner as “She’s Got You” (apostrophe) and also as “She’s Got You” (right single quotation mark). If I edit the track title so that both match then only 1 of the tracks will show up in “Popular Tracks”.
It’s not limited to the apostrophe and the right single quotation mark. I’ve seen it with other punctuation marks (period or no period).
