If an album has multiple album artists, these artists get combined into 1 artist. It would be more organised if the multiple album artists of a single album get seperated. In other words: support for multiple album artists.
Example:
I have an album 'Ad Astra (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), which has ‘Max Richter, Lorne Balfe, Nils Frahm’ as the album artists. In the current situation these 3 artists get combined into a single artist in the ‘artist’ section. These 3 artists should be 3 seperate artists in the ‘artists’ section.
The way Plex is designed, it is very hard to do. The current relational database design in Plex uses a single table for tracks, albums and artists, which means a track can only be linked to one album, and each album is linked to one artist. This unfortunate decision was made more than ten years ago, and it’s been holding Plex back ever since.
In principle Plex could refactor the database to make artist-track and artist-album a many-to-many relationship like it’s done in Kodi, Jellyfin, Emby, Navidrome etc - but that’s a major rebuild of the internals, I doubt it will happen soon, the Plex devs seem to do small improvements, not major reworkings. Maybe in a future Plex Media Server 2.0, but I’m not holding by breath.
I thought this was already completed?
I have many soundtracks that have multiple artists. I have fixed them before using the “Artist” field but now that I have a new one I just ripped I need to fix this again but cant seem to see that field anymore.
see example below
the Album Artist is Various Artists but the specific song artist is able to be changed to match the actual artist. by going into each song and editing that field.
Multiple artist linking shouldn’t even be that difficult. If metadata tags are embedded, they should automatically read multiple album artists using the comma to separate each artist as their own tag. It’s annoying to have ONE singular artist be the MAIN artist and then remember that single artist when doing a search. Any of the other artists involved in the same body of work should be acknowledged and searched as a possible album artist entry.
Look, if Spotify can do it, I’m sure Plex can do it.
Reading multiple artists from the tags is not the hard part, it’s the storing it in the internal database of Plex.
The Spotify backend has been built from the start to support multiple artists on the track and album level, Plex hasn’t. It would be a big rework of the database (and API), I doubt we’ll see it soon.
