Just bumping to say that this feature is still nessisary today, and the lack of composer field and multiple artist support is what keeps me from effectively using plex to manage my music. Well that and the broken plex sync.
4 Likes
Do you have knowledge about some Plex alternatives that have composer and multiple artist support?
Roon. Costs six times the amount of Plex lifetime ā but isnāt six times better. Needs always internet online, even to play local media. But hey: It can do multiple artists. And without kidding: It has a brilliant metadata ability!
For me itās still a nogo because of the online situationā¦
2 Likes
Jellyfin does multiple artists and handles compilations very well. But no composer support and the user experience is kinda rough compared to Plexamp.
There is this request Non-numerical labels for discs - #15 by badtaste666_protonmail_com for this
Currently ripping/importing a huge box set (King Crimson, āRoad to Redā), and dropping by to bump the request. Would really like to see the āDisc Subtitleā tag, which Musicbrainz Picard is telling me exists, to label all of these live performances (about 20 of them). Having āDisc 15ā or āDisc 21ā or whatever is a step in the right direction, but it would be great if the āDisc Subtitleā field could be employed to clean this up a bit.
And yes to classical music. I have a lot of that as well, and āComposerā would be a huge benefit.
Thanks.
1 Like
Iām not a coder so I donāt know the level of complexity this would require. But why not allow the end user to specify ID3 tags? In another software I use I can add my own tags, or tags that exist in the ID3 specs but the software doesnāt directly support. This is what I did to add one for the grouping tag, which wasnāt in the software. It has a section to define tags that it doesnāt pick up.
name: grouping
value: $meta_sep(grouping, \)
field: %grouping%
I use the grouping and comment tags for all my music and itās a real bummer Plex canāt work with them for smart playlists. So Iām basically unable to make my normal playlists in Plex. And I really like Plexamp so I want it to be my music player, but without full ID3 tag support, Iām still gonna be mostly be using iTunes until Plex changes things here. I still use Plexamp sometimes and am a Pass subscriber. But I wish it could be my main player.
1 Like
I just pulled my music library into Plex to see if this was a workable alternative to iTunes . . . and without implementation of playlist filters built on the full ID3 tag set, itās completely unworkable for me as a music player. I have a very, very large classical music collection, and the way Plexamp presents it is just useless. I had a brief hope that āfolderā view would help, but itās a flat folder view which negates any potential it may have had as a workaround. Ability to create playlists from all ID3 tags (primarily composer, grouping, genre, and notes) are essential, along with (requested in another thread) the ability to nest playlists.
4 Likes
Appreciation up front:
Having read this entire thread, I must commend some of the posters. Youāve dug into this far deeper than I have/could. Thank you for helping educate me on what I think I am seeing.
My situation:
I moved my Plex install to a new machine. The move was program and db only. All of my content (movies/tv/music/audiobooks/etc) reside on my NAS and remain unchanged through my program move. When I brought up the new box (following the guidance in Plex), I had to identify where my libraries were and ended up rescanning them. While the loss of movie collections and music playlists are worthy of a discussion, the issue that I see on the rescan of my music catalog has turned into much more work. I believe I followed all of the instructions correctly, but may have missed something.
An album with a single artist rescanned and came over clean. No issues there where the album was recognized by the Plex agent and scan.
The issue that I have experienced in spades, is that Albums where there were guest performers or collaboration on individual tracks come over as separate title(s) differentiated by the performers (guest and the major performer). When you look at Recently Added in Music, I see multiple listings for a single album. This isnāt any different than how it has worked in weeks/months/years past when I have added new music and though it was always a slight pain in the derriĆØre to correct and merge those listings in the past it really wasnāt that big of a deal when it was 1 to a dozen new albums a week that I was adding.
Now however, the reimport of my entire music catalog because of my compute box update makes me want to start drinking again in as much as the amount of manual work to bring all of these albums back together again (literally 10ās of thousands of individual entries) is staring me in the face.
Questions:
- Is there a setting in the existing tags that I should have been using to prevent this?
- Do others see this same behavior? It certainly sounds like it was identified in 2015 in this whole thread.
- Is there a known method to prevent this from occurring on daily music imports or library moves or updates?
At the least this bumps the conversation to last another 90 days.
Thanks in advance to anyone who may have a solution. Happy Plexing!
I think that the Album Artist tag needs to be ONE NAME ONLY even if that is not what you want for the album. Itās like the āfile this underā name and you have to pick just one name.
āVarious Artistsā is a special reserved Album Artist tag that is used for such albums.
Tracks can have multiple and differing Artist tags (use a null separator), though AFAIK Plex does not actually look at any Artist tags past the first one, at least in some file formats.
It can take a lot of work to get your library metadata to Plexās liking. While you are doing this, I suggest you work like thisā¦
- Turn off every kind of time-consuming metadata lookup like artist bios and concert dates.
- Turn off every kind of time consuming media analysis
- When you make a change to your library metadata and you want to see if it helped, DELETE the library and re-add the music folder. This forces a total rebuild, which is always the best procedure if you are testing big changes. (If all metadata changes were always picked up perfectly, we wouldnāt have a link for the Plex Dance.)
- Once everything looks right, turn all the fancy features back on, rescan the library, and enjoy Plex.
1 Like
The issue with Plex not supporting multi-disc albums is most common, you can find hundreds if not thousands posts about it.
So sad it is that it will never be fixed, This is commonly known as"Packaging problem": Smaller, fixable issue is attached to this huge unfixable issue, and will never get fixed now. And this endless discussion, only grows. Author added all their wishes as āmust-haveā, including classical music management.
ITās all great but letās fix bleeding things first?
They seem to work for me, what am I missing?
Itās very depressing reading a 9 year old thread with bursts of hope for minimal improvements to classical libaries ā¦ and then nothing. Meanwhile every other week thereās some feature built on shoving external content that I have no interest in at me. I got Plex to manage my content, not be bathed in the media equivalent of industrial waste that I see being offered.
Anyway. Just to be able to select display fields in the music playback screen would be lovely. I have so many recital disks of classical and jazz music where the composer information is absent. I may as well just be using VLC.
4 Likes
I feel somewhat the same. I also want to manage a more classical music library, but for that, the minimum requirement would be to be able to display multiple artists and composers.
I also donāt understand why such small improvements are not possible to implement. Plex has the potential to become an alternative (at least for some people) to Roon, Funkwhale, Airsonic, etc.
I gave up and completely removed my music from Plex, and uninstalled PlexAmp. Went back to iTunes Match, which is a complete PITA but will actually sort and display my classical music in a usable manner, externally accessible, etc.
Plex are too busy stuffing useless features/changes into the product (like their recent āimprovementā of movie poster source which means I now have to set aside a few evenings and go through my library and change back all the posters the update switched to new posters that look like pre-schooler was giving prompts to an AI art generator.)
Iāll check back every few years to the forums to check, in the hope that someday PlexAmp will go back to substance instead of flash and PlexAmp will have been turned into a usable product. I honestly would much rather be using it than iTunes Match or some other home grown solution, but until they start supporting the full range of industry standard metadata tags, and paying attention to the feedback in the forums, that isnāt going to happen.
Iām suspicious thatās not going to happen though, as others have pointed out in other forum posts and threads, Plex seems to be in full on ābecome profitableā mode . . . which, in and of itself isnāt a bad thing, you canāt lose money forever . . . but seem to have made the error of thinking the path to profitability is flashy announcements and the continual layering on of unwanted features, rather than a product with a solid functional core.
3 Likes
I only use Plex for music when I am deeply remote and have access to Plex in some nominal form. MediaMonkey is far, far superior to Plex with respect to music supportā¦ and it even has a rational, well-designed data schema.
Plex is just an abject failure for finding your music and making playlists.
ā#
2 Likes
Fully support this, and have added my vote. Itās deeply frustrating that the IDE3 tags are not properly supported; and lacking the basic composer tag makes Plex virtually unusable for classical music.
3 Likes
Itās great that one is able to add the āRecord Labelā info to each album but Iām sure that a lot of people would also love to add āProducer / Composerā info to each song.
Any chance this field can be added to the individual song-metadata?
Thanks
1 Like
Pretty sure this is a duplicate
Itās included in this comprehensive request.
[mod-edit: merged to maintain votes]
