Problem adding to a collection with a phrase name

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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1

I have a reasonably large collection of music videos and recently thought I should assign them to collections based on artist name. So I went through and put e.g. all my David Bowie videos into a “David Bowie” collection, and I was just about to post here asking how I could bulk change all of them so the collection was called “Bowie, David” when I discovered that collections have a sort field. Yay. That problem’s sorted :slight_smile:

However… I also have many videos where the artist name is “Emerson, Lake & Palmer” but when I try to add that tag to a video it breaks at the comma and assigns the tag “Emerson” instead. I could edit the collection name to that of the group, but whenever I try to add a second video to the collection it will force me to put the video in “Emerson” instead.

Is there a trick I’m missing here? Or are commas OK in sort names but disallowed in collection names?

2

I’ve been checking this on my system… this seemed to work fine, e.g. for „Family Guy Trilogy: Laugh It, Up Fuzzball!“

Edit: let me verify if I’ve used this as the actual tag or if I renamed that collection after creating it.

3

Is there already a same-named (dumb) collection? (Or was it just recently deleted?)

Make sure you are using the hosted web app https://app.plex.tv

4

Bonus trick:
The latest update of Plex Web has added some major updates to collections (currently only available via the hosted web app → hence otto‘s link, or via The Plex for Mac desktop client v1.31.0+).

This version has introduced a new section in the context menu of your media where you can e.g. pick ... > Add to > Collection. From that dialog you can pick an existing collection or create a new one. There, entering a comma won’t limit the tag name.

5

That sounds good. My library is hosted on a NAS and I am accessing it in Chrome on Win10/64 through server:port/web/index.html; I’m not sure if that counts as the web app or not. Settings > General says I am running version 4.54.5. I have version 1.22.2.4282-6000 of the media server installed on the NAS.

As a temporary workaround I just dropped the comma, which at least lets me add to the correct collection without truncating the tag and starting to add a second one.

6

Those different versions and their names can be confusing.

  1. „Hosted“ refers to the version of Plex Web made available via Plex‘ own servers → http://app.plex.tv/desktop
  2. „Bundled“ refers to the version of Plex Web installed locally on your server → http://[PMS IP address]:32400/web
  3. To make things a bit more complicated there’s also a version of Plex Web used in the desktop client „Plex for Mac/Windows“

Technically both (#1+2) will be loaded into your browser and connect to your servers/libraries from there. The bundled version is usually a few releases behind.