Yesterday i realized that there is no way to filter for tracks with a specific artist. Only the album artist field seems to be filterable. For whatever reason I wanted to listen to just the tracks by a specific artist on an album.
I made a filter like this:
But that doesn’t work, because his name is in the album artist field, so that’s a match for all the tracks on that album, as the “Artist Name” field searches the Album Artist tag. And that means I’m just playing the album normally.
The obvious solution would be to add the possibility to filter for “Track Artist” under the Track portion of the filter rules. Rather niche, I know, but it seems to me like a flaw in an otherwise very powerful filtering tool. Unless I’m missing something obvious?
That would be a weird field to not support for a music library, imho. The Plex music library really leaves a lot to be desired with its strange limitations.
In the plex web interface, you can use the title library view. Though filtering the track artists is not possible there, sorting the list of tracks from A-Z according to the track artists names is. From there you can select the items with the track artist and create a playlist. That approach is a bit counterintuitive and cumbersome, but possible. Introducing an easier way would be nice though.
For sure! But I don’t really want to pre-create static playlists for my musical whims most of the time. That is not really the important part of this issue to me.
But the fact that Plex seemingly can’t properly utilize the Artist field in a music file kind of highlights that the music library in Plex is lacking a lot of basic handling of music files. This has been a requested feature since 2015, but it’s still not implemented properly. It got a lot better along with the release of Plexamp, but it’s clearly still a lot of work left on the server side of things.
I couldn‘t agree more. I thought pointing at a workaround would be nice having, but the underlying structural issue with Various Artists albums and the originalTitle/track artist field remains and should be worked upon, especially since plexamp is such a great piece of software! We got the long awaited track genres since a couple of months, so maybe track artists could come next?
