The ID3 specification authors should have also made a field for Lyricist and Producer–two important people who often determine whether or not you will like a song. I put lyricist in with composer and I ve put Producer in Comments for years. I have a number of favorite producers in popular music.
I’d like to see the Comments field as a float over on a track. granted, on software that didn’t support a lyrics field–which Plex sometimes recognizes–I’m not sure why not at times-- lyrics would be in the Comment field. That makes the comments long and probably in need of truncation below using in a popup
Personally I don’t see why each person shouldn’t have an unlimited number of votes. What is the downside? Havning to use the fingers on more than two hands to count the votes for some suggestion? The wheat will still rise above the chaff but it allows ideas that come in NOW to gain attention and traction and rise to the top without hundreds of people having to decide what to no longer vote for instead.
Something I think your original post touches on but doesn’t emphasize enough is multiple artist support in the TPE1 tag. A huge portion of my music library features multiple artists, and Plex not recognizing multiple artists when separated by “/” is a frustrating omission. As it is, if I have a track by Artist A and Artist B, and I set the tag as “Artist A/Artist B” I expect there to be an artist listing for both Artist A and Artist B and for both to show the track.
Instead, Plex currently only makes artist listings for Album Artists, likely as a side effect of not properly implementing tags for Track Artists. The result is that if I want to listen to music from an artist with multiple individual tracks but no Album Artist credit, I’m pretty well screwed.
A good point, thanks. I added a new bullet point in the TPE section. Hopefully that will be a natural effect of enabling all this, but it doesn’t hurt to call it out explicitly.
Nice! I agree that it should fall out of better tag implementation, but I always worry considering Plex’s habit of favouring Album Artist over Track Artist in the past.
One of the things I’d like for Plex to do is not try to reinvent the wheel itself (ie, make dumb choices like apply Genre on Album level etc) but simply replicate how the existing state-of-the-art music managers do things.
This issue really holds me back from committing to Plex for a media server. I just have so little control over my music with Plex. This was requested over 3 years ago? I’m not optimistic there’s going to be any change over something this basic, and doesn’t drive any more obvious revenue like Tidal or Live TV perhaps does. But I won’t sign up until I can properly manage my music.
Isn’t GRP1 being used for the same purpose as TIT1?
GRP1 is the new Grouping tag since iTunes 12.4, before that iTunes used TIT1. When iTunes added support for Work/Movement (TIT1/TIT3, for better management of classical music) in 12.4, Apple had to create a new Grouping tag.
But I won’t sign up until I can properly manage my music.
To be fair, you can manage your music just fine in a ‘proper’ library manager like iTunes or foobar2k. Plex will probably never be as powerful as those, with scripting support, mass tagging, etc.
But yeah music playback would be a lot easier if Plex at least got some of the basics right (at the very least support Genre and Year by track instead of by album, and the Composer field).
Anyway, with gapless being implemented now, this topic is now the highest voted feature request for Music One thing at least, with the Tidal integration it becomes even more obvious how much needs to be done to bring Plex Music even to the level of Tidal, let alone iTunes/foobar. For example, Tidal supports by-track Genres, and the fields of Composer, Producer, Performer, Artist and Lyricist.
Because lots of people use Grouping for other things than just a classical Work, like grouping music by Mood, Country, Label or Subgenre, and Apple seemed to want to retain that functionality.
Apple have now (correctly) reduced TIT1 to the more strict ID3v2.4 definition of Work (which allows them to tag classical music better), while their wish to maintain the original functionality of Grouping has resulted in a new field GRP1. I personally think that’s a well thought-out way to deal with it.
The ID3 specification authors should have also made a field for Lyricist and Producer–two important people who often determine whether or not you will like a song.
They did, although few music players support them:
TEXT (“Lyricist/Text writer”)
TPE4 (“Interpreted, remixed, or otherwise modified by”, effectively you could call this “Remix Artist”)
TIPL (“Involved People List”, a list of roles/names, which could Producer, Engineer, Coffee Boy, etc)
The Involved People List is TIPL if you are using ID3 v2.4 (not all players support this) or IPLS in ID3 v2.3.
The ID3 v2.3 spec is more widely supported, though the IPLS tag may not be.
I would also use TPE4 for “Arranger” in classical genres, if you wanted to track that.
Is this still an issue? For multiple artists I mean? Why do we still not have an Album Artist field? I don’t see why I need to use Winamp or FileBot to change the album artist. Surely doing it through PLEX would be more logical?
One thing at least, with the Tidal integration it becomes even more obvious how much needs to be done to bring Plex Music even to the level of Tidal, let alone iTunes/foobar. For example, Tidal supports by-track Genres, and the fields of Composer, Producer, Performer, Artist and Lyricist.