I am now familiar with how Plex utilizes the "album artist" tag for grouping purposes - and it does a fine job with that. However, when I search by artist, Plex never looks at the "artist" tag - and so will pull up no results when I search through a compilation album for a specific artist.
Example: An album (and all individual tracks within) with "album artist" as "Various Artists", but with each track having a unique "artist" tag will never search properly - because it is only ever looking at the "album artist" tag.
So, am I missing something here or is there a way to tell Plex to search the "artist" tag when performing an artist search? It seems a little silly that every single compilation album is basically never going to be searched.
I am pleased this is not just me, I have only just started to use Plex and have imported several 1000 tracks via the folder location which are also used within iTunes. When I search a track, it finds the track and shows various artist even though the track artist is listed under the meta data. This then also shows incorrectly on all the playlists etc. Thanks
Still not fixed unfortunately, it’s been years. Apparently, Plex only has one field in its database for Artist. When scanning the music files, it puts the Album Artist there, and only if there’s none, uses the contents of the Artist tag. So if your file has two different values for Album Artist and Artist, the latter is unused.
It’s a real pain, especially since pretty much every other music player in the past fifteen years does this correctly. It’s probably the biggest remaining bug in Plex.
@jimbobslimbob said:
I am now familiar with how Plex utilizes the “album artist” tag for grouping purposes - and it does a fine job with that. However, when I search by artist, Plex never looks at the “artist” tag - and so will pull up no results when I search through a compilation album for a specific artist.
Example: An album (and all individual tracks within) with “album artist” as “Various Artists”, but with each track having a unique “artist” tag will never search properly - because it is only ever looking at the “album artist” tag.
So, am I missing something here or is there a way to tell Plex to search the “artist” tag when performing an artist search? It seems a little silly that every single compilation album is basically never going to be searched.
I made a similar post myself and DarkeSword also has issue as well as Daveinc here. Sonos deals with this issue well.
There was an answer from Plex in Daveinc’s post, but that was back in April (20th):
@chrisallen said:
Unfortunately searching for an artist within a compilation (Various Artists) album is not yet supported. It is however, something we are aware of and it’ll be supported in an upcoming release.
Having the same issue. I use Plex for music throughout most of the day. It would be great if I could search for artists within my compilations. Eagerly watching each update in hopes for a fix. *fingers crossed
I will also put my two cents worth in on this. I was a bit shocked that all my genre data didn’t come across from Window Media Player from any wma file. But, the artist information seemed to be mostly there but not searchable. What’s up with that?
I switched from emby to plex because the great apps and streaming features but this problem is a bump!
I have lots of albums with various artists and i cannot search for the artists inside this albums and they don’t show up on the artists page… please fix this. is even a PMS developer looking at the forum and what people ask?
I agree, I also have a lot of various artist albums, or albums that have a few songs featuring an additional artist. It would be great to have Plex search by Artist instead of Album Artist.
I only ever used Plex for my movies before now, however I have just spent the last three days setting up my music collection. As with previous posts I am rather surprised that running a search for an artist name doesn’t include the track artist, I have over 100 albums that are compilations that are Various Artists and not being able to search by track artist is a very big negative for the Plex system. Other than this I love using Plex. Developers please can you add this functionality! I understand you use SQLite databases, I haven’t interrogated them yet, but if the field exists for the Track Artist it would be fairly easy to query?
I’ve not tried Plex yet and need to be sure about how it handles music data before taking the plunge, but it seems to me the above problem could be fixed by NOT setting the ALBUM ARTIST of compilations to ‘Various’ or ‘Various Artists’ or anything at all. Leave it blank and then Plex will use the track artist and hence be searchable. These compilations should still be kept out of the main artists list due to their compilation flag setting - assuming Plex correctly deals with that and keeps them separate.
I would suggest any developer of such software looks at how iTunes handles all this. Apple’s product may not be perfect, but it seems to have this pretty well nailed down - better than anything else I’ve ever seen. I am constantly dumbfounded by the ignorance of almost all developers of music playing apps who seem unable to grasp the simple concepts of how to sort data. The fact that Plex only has space for one artist field is indicative of the fact they never thought this through in the first place and leads me then to ask how they sort the Artists list? What about the list of an artist’s albums? If they use the normal tags for this then they’re idiots. Maybe they do use the relevant SORT tags, but if they only store one ARTIST tag, I suspect they may sort on that. Can anyone confirm the following:-
Are compilations in a separate section with those artists kept out of the main artists list?
When looking at a list of all artists, can ‘The Beatles’ be sorted under ‘T’ or as they should be under ‘B’?
Is a list of an artist’s albums sorted by the ALBUM tag or the SORT ALBUM tag?
Do they sort a list of all of an artist’s tracks by SORT ALBUM first, then DISC No., then Track No.? Or horror of horrors, is it simply an alphabetical list.
Answers to these questions will determine whether Plex is a serious and worthwhile music management app or just another useless waste of space.
Just adding another voice to the request for this feature. Like others I have an extensive range of compilation albums that Plex groups under Various Artists - I’m fine with that but consequently the artist search needs to search by track artist rather than album artist - Track artists are there for every track on every album so I’d love an answer from Plex as to why this change can’t happen - seems like it’s been being “worked on” for a damn long time.
With the recent release of PMS 1.0.0 and Plex Web 2.7.0, searching for an artist will list tracks from a compilation album, but they will be listed under Tracks.
What would really tie this together, in my opinion, is to have track artists set as tags similar to the existing genre tags. In so doing albums can still remain together appropriately, but you can then create another filter based on the tag and it will pull not only tracks on compilations but also tracks where there was collaboration among artists.
…So… Tracks by an artist that are in a compilation album still won’t display in the Artist screen? They only show up when you actively search for an artist. This seems like a flaw, as others have identified. It makes sense that when you view your music library by album, you’ll only get complete albums by that artist; but viewing by artist, and going into the artist screen; should show you ALL songs/tracks by the artist. Especially in the popular tracks section, if one of the songs from the compilation is their most famous song.
Still nothing new?
I would really like to sort my library by track-artist. Just like I did for many years with winamp.
It would be nice, if a developer read this.
