Still no support for individual music "singles"

General Discussions
1

I’ve just decided to go with Plex which will hopefully cure all my issues I’ve been having with BubbleUPNP with Twonky Server.

Here is my issue that I’m sure many also still have. I have read many articles relating to this and as they are quite old, I thought…surely not…?

Here is my problem, I have thousands of single tracks that I have downloaded or transferred from CDs over many years. Although I also have albums, my collection is made up mainly of singles.

They are stored in decades. So for instance, I have around 1,500 singles in my “Tracks from the 1980s” folder. All painstakingly Tag ID’d correctly, but Plex just does a terrible job of adding these to the library and it’s a mess.

Why in 2022 is their library still insisting on “everything MUST be an album”. I’ve read the fix to add each single as a separate “album”, but just imagine the work involved in just my example above. 1,500 singles and that’s just one decade. It also makes searching for artists non-existent. I think it’s time Plex overhauled their very outdated DB design.

Is there really no fix to this and am I again going to hit the uninstall button and search for that very elusive solution?

2

Most of that work can be automated, using the right software and a bit of planning.
Take a look at e.g. Musicbrainz Picard or mp3tag

3

…but it’s not a fix, it’s a zip tie to hold together a broken bridge.

I can’t see how mp3tag would resolve that as it won’t reorganise folders. All the music is correctly tagged using mp3tag. It’s the folder structures that would an incredible amount of work and the result when finished would be that the library would have something like 10,000 albums. For something as powerful as Plex, it’s library is terrible because it was designed overcomplicated.

4

It can totally do that. Take a look at its Convert - Tags → File Names feature.

In a first step, you copy the track title into the field for the album title (if it’s not already populated with the actual album or single release name).
Then you copy the artist name into the “Album Artist” meta tag. (Again, unless it’s already populated.)

In a third step, you use the above mentioned conversion to create new file names from the embedded meta tags – which can include path names.
Here is a format string which should do this:
$if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)\$if2(%album%\,)$if(%track%,$num(%track%,2) - ,)%artist% - %title%

5

Ah, ok, I didn’t realise the File Name renaming could organise into folders. Thanks for the headsup, but I think it’ll make the Plex experience terrible with so many “Albums” in the library.

Until, Plex fix this (not sure they can as it’ll mean a DB restructure for everyone), then it’s not the server for me.

6

If one has the time and patience to reorganize their music files in the way Plex madates, it really does work great. Sadly, the “Various Artists” work around is highly annoying because now you are locked into a single album image for your entire library.

It really would be nice if Plex actually honored the data in the Album field of an MP3 when pulling DB data from the 'net. Heck, I’d be happy it would give an educated guess at the album based solely on title-artist information if other data was missing. I understand that Plex has limited development hours available and limited budget, but hopefully some day it can catch up to what other music players have been doing for many-many years.

7

That was not mentioned above and is also untrue.

8

I’ve tried the various artists method multiple times and every track under the various artists album displays the same album cover while playing the song rather than an album cover specific to the song.

I’ve tried the method detailed for various artists here: Adding Music Media From Folders | Plex Support

9

Again, this is off-topic.
You are somehow of the opinion that the “artist” Various Artists can only have one album listed under it. Which is absolutely not true.
You can have hundreds of albums/releases in there. And each can have its own album art.

What is true, is that you cannot have album art for each individual track in Plex.
It’s called “album art” for a reason.

10

It works pretty ok.

Singles in the GUI

Screen Shot 2022-03-14 at 20.46.16
Screen Shot 2022-03-14 at 20.46.161920×302 49.5 KB

A single

Screen Shot 2022-03-14 at 20.46.28
Screen Shot 2022-03-14 at 20.46.28881×568 91.1 KB

the directory structure.

xxxxxxxx@desktop:/Volumes/Media/Music/Flacs/The KLF/Justified & Ancient$ pwd
/Volumes/Media/Music/Flacs/The KLF/Justified & Ancient
xxxxxxxx@desktop:/Volumes/Media/Music/Flacs/The KLF/Justified & Ancient$ ls -al
total 190328
drwxr-xr-x 1 xxxxxxxx users 862 Jan 8 22:17 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 xxxxxxxx users 1208 Jan 12 20:05 ..
-rw-r–r-- 1 xxxxxxxx users 26443698 Jan 16 14:29 ‘01 The KLF (lead vocals_ The First Lady of Country miss Tammy Wynette) - Justified & Ancient (Stand by the Jams).flac’
-rw-r–r-- 1 xxxxxxxx users 24312503 Jan 8 20:33 ‘02 The KLF (lead vocals_ Black Steel) - Justified & Ancient (The White Room Version).flac’
-rw-r–r-- 1 xxxxxxxx users 55123882 Jan 8 20:33 ‘03 The KLF (lead vocals_ Maxine Harvey) - Justified & Ancient (All Bound for Mu Mu Land).flac’
-rw-r–r-- 1 xxxxxxxx users 43057619 Jan 8 20:33 ‘04 The KLF - Justified & Ancient (Make Mine a 99).flac’
-rw-r–r-- 1 xxxxxxxx users 45883711 Jan 8 20:33 ‘05 The KLF - Justified & Ancient (Let Them Eat Ice Cream).flac’
-rw-r–r-- 1 xxxxxxxx users 64270 Jan 18 2021 folder.jpg
xxxxxxxx@desktop:/Volumes/Media/Music/Flacs/The KLF/Justified & Ancient$

11

I’ve experimented with this, and have found that Plex is very accurate when dealing with properly-tagged files. It’s possible that your tags aren’t as correct as you think.

I too keep my music files meticulously tagged. My normal folder/file structure is this:

Music
  Genre
    Artist
      Album
        track 1.mp3
        track 2.mp3

After Plex made a change in the Plex Music agent last year to reduce dependency on the folder/file names, I did the following:

  1. Copied several genres/artists/albums to a parallel folder.
  2. Moved all the individual tracks from every album up to its ‘Genre’ level. These include individual artist albums, Various Artist albums, singles, EPs, the tracks now all bundled together.
  3. Renamed every file to ‘genre-0001.mp3’

So now I have an experimental structure literally named like this:

Music
  Celtic
    celtic-0001.mp3
    celtic-0002.mp3
  Rock
    rock-0001.mp3
    rock-0002.mp3
...

I normally use sidecar album cover files rather than embedded, but since I can’t have a dozen ‘cover.jpg’ files in one folder, I embedded album covers in some of these files to make sure it worked.

So now, other than the genre, there are no clues in the folder/file structure as to the artist, album, or track titles. With Plex fully configured to prefer local metadata, this assures that Plex must depend on the embedded tags.

I created a library pointing to the Music folder in the above structure and turned it loose. The resulting library was nearly perfect, with the same organization of artists and albums as my original library with the fully-specified folder/filename structure. Those tracks that had embedded album art used that art, while the rest drew cover images from MusicBrainz, and artist posters from wherever MusicBrainz gets them.

The point of all this is, Plex can successfully parse a folder full of mixed individual tracks from multiple albums, if the embedded tags are accurate. If your experience resulted in a “mess,” I’d recommend taking another look at your tags.

12

Thanks for the reply but yes, my tags are correct, they work just fine with every other Media Server library I have trialed. No matter what is done with tags, Plex still has a database structure that is indexed on “Album Artist” which doesn’t suit my requirements.

Plex is probably great for video but I don’t need a video media server as I have hardware-based equipment for that. The music library is just too frustrating and have now actually moved on to a much simpler solution that works great and the library works as expected too. The Logitech Media Server that was released for their Squeezebox products now works directly with Chromecast and supports Replaygain, the solution I have been searching for and also saves the Plexpass fee too.

13

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