Right now, everywhere in plexamp the album-metadata are shown. I am not denying that for some users this may be great.
However, there are situations where you really don’t want albums. For instance, when you have only 1-2 songs per album (because you conciously have decided that the rest you don’t want), but you simply want to listen to all tracks of a specific artist (across albums, which may be authored by multiple artists).
In my library, I remove all album-related information, because any grouping by album is just a nonesense. What I really look for is track-level information (and grouping thereby, rather than albums).
Track Title
Track Artist
Track Composer
Track Genre
etc
I would like to propose a setting where users can chose whether they want to use album-information (current behavior), or rather rely on track-level information.
When not using album-information, I would see this as the desired behavior:
Under “recently added”, we would show “{Artist} - {Title}” (where the Artist is the one of the track, not the album)
When yo go to “Top artists” or “Artists”, I would expect the artist names from the tracks, and then you click on the arist’s name to see the underlying tracks (same as what you see currently under ‘Tracks’)
Rather than showing “Album Genres”, I would expect “Track Genres”
You may now think: Why don’t you simply write the track’s artist into the album artist metadata? Because it’s not the same. In an album you may have several artists, and if you want to have the songs from one artist across any album (since again, the album doesn’t matter in my context), you’re out of luck. And within one album, you may also encounter several genres!
For reference, I upload here how the metadata of my tracks look like (via Apple’s Music app). As you can see, the “Title”, “Artist”, “Composer”, and “Genre” are perfectly filled.
My suggestion is in the navigation; there the track-level info seem not to be shown, and everything is centered around Album info.
I propose to give the user the choice to change that (as I dont think I will be able to convince you to change it for everyone), ie. That users can chose to see track artist rather than album artist; that under ‚recently added‘ users see tracks (artist - title)rather than albums (album artist - album name); that when you look into genres, you see tracks (potentially grouped by track artist) but not albums
I’m sorry, but there’s a lot of stuff inside the media server which assumes the artist > album > track hierarchy, there’s not much Plexamp can do to avoid that.
On the lowest level is the track, which has several attributes.
Track - title
Track - genre
Track - artist
Track - album
Album is a group of tracks and there is an artist that put the album together (which may be the same or a different artist than the one of the tracks).
Thus the hierarchy you mentioned
Track-album-album artist is legit, but misses a lot of the more granular (and in my view more important) metadata on track level.
I am happy to raise the feature request to the server team if you say that is where the change would have to happen.
As the person who designed the server database scheme over a decade ago, I assure you that the server has a very strong artist > album > track hierarchy
I am not saying that the way you designed the database is wrong.
What I am saying is that I think it can be expanded. That’s why I propose this request.
It’s not wrong to have a hierarchy between track-album-albumartist
but it is falling short of showing tracks grouped by different track-level infor, such as tracks grouped by trackartist, tracks grouped by trackgenres, etc.
the data required to do that is already present in the ID3 tags (in case of mp3).
if the current server doesn’t parse it, fine, let’s add a feature request there.
this doesn’t change the database for the current behavior, it’s just an extension for track-level fields, and being able ton the frontend to group by those (rather than album-level info)
looking through reddit and this forum, it’s not that i’m the first one asking for this.
This one, for instance, is 12 years old (and there’s plenty of other reuqests asking for track-level information)
I’m not sure I understand the pushback on this one; sure, it’s work, but being able to show track information is not a niche-request i’d argue…
I’ve complained about a similar problem before and never got an answer. There’s a large folder on my server that I basically use as a “staging area” until I can get around to tagging all the music and moving it into the library (likely never going to happen completely).
I like to listen to the untagged music but it bugs me to no end that plex just shows unknown" for everything in plexamp, but in the web UI I can see what it has pulled from the filename:
It’s weird that it’s not getting a title, I would have expected it to for sure fallback to something. Do you have “Prefer Local Metadata” on for the library?
dialog and take a screenshot.
