Tag support for ROBUST music library organization

Sounds good! So when will it be available as beta for plex pass users?:slightly_smiling_face:

I’m not privvy to that, and I’m not going to say ā€˜Soon,’ because I hate it when they say that to me. :slight_smile:

The only reason for tag editing is to get around the PLEX dance after you manually edit the tags. If that goes away, then I really don’t need tag editing.

I was recruited to do some testing on the new metadata upgrades that Plex folks have alluded to.

Awesome. I’m sure there’s a few bugs to iron out but good to see there’s at least a decent overhaul.Can you lift the tip of the veil on any of these features?

  • multiple values for Genre and Artist?
  • how does it handle albums with tracks from multiple years?
  • do individual V/A compilation tracks also appear under the Artist view?
  • Composer?

I haven’t seen much change in those areas, but some discussion. The biggest thing right now is killing the Dance.

In my memory, Plex has generally imported multiple genres. They appear when you edit the album, but only two are displayed on the album detail page.

i really need this :heart:
this woudld also improve artist radio and i really start to enjoy artist radio more an more

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In my memory, Plex has generally imported multiple genres. They appear when you edit the album, but only two are displayed on the album detail page.

AFAIK Plex currently can only do two genres - and not per track, only per album. The API apparently also only returns two genres max, so this is not something 3rd party clients can fix, it’s a Plex internal database limitation.

Great news that the Dance will not be needed anymore in the future - loads of my songs get tags updated/fixed over time which now means I completely remove & rebuild my Plex music database every 3 or so months, which isn’t a dealbreaker but does kill all listening stats.

I’m pretty sure that @beckfield is correct, that Plex imports multiple genres correctly. I have many albums with more than 2 genres. As far as I can tell, Plex also reads the genre for each track in an album from the embedded metadata, and then combines them all for the genre for the album.

I don’t know what info the API can return, but a search or filter on a library will return any of the multiple genres assigned to an album. It seems to work on the web app, my android phone and a Roku.

I’m hoping that the genres for individual tracks is actually stored some place in the database, but currently is not used in any way. Maybe the new improved music system will use it.

Here’s an image of the genre tags associated with one of my albums. I haven’t edited any of the info manually, The genres are all track based, obviously none of the tracks are all of those genres. :wink:

Ah awesome that must’ve been added quite recently then? Still it’s somewhat odd that Genres only apply per Album, but that’s a legacy design choice I guess.

I’ve always wondered how the fields Moods and Record Label (for Albums) and Country (for Artists) get populated - I don’t think the agent uses any ID3 tags or MP4 atoms for that, so that’s just for last.fm metadata?

I think it’s always been that way, at least with a Premium library. I don’t remember exactly what my old standard library had for genres, but I think similar.

I believe that was Gracenote, which was part of the Premium Library package and it’s no longer available. As of right now, I think all libraries, Premium or standard, are using Last.FM as the agent to fill in any missing metadata. Gracenote provided the moods for sure, so none of our albums or tracks added since then have any mood info. At least mine don’t. The also don’t have Record labels or Country even if the embedded mp3 metadata has that information.

I should say, as far as I know, the work to kill the Dance is currently just in Music libraries. I don’t know if they’re working on the Movie agent(s) or not. Hopefully the work on Music will provide some learnings that will help in other areas.

If proper support for the Description tag isn’t added, please consider giving the option to pass the ā€œDescriptionā€ tag to the ā€œReviewā€ field. I have a library of several thousand audiobooks and I don’t fancy manually adding a ā€œReviewā€ to each one when the description of the book is say happily in the ā€œDescriptionā€ tag anyway.

We need more tags for music, its incredible what poor are now…pls PLEX!!!

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Which tag is the Description tag, it doesn’t seem to be in the id3 specs? It’s not the COMM (Comments) field is it? Or are we talking about MP4 atoms?

I’m looking mostly at m4b files, so yes talking about MP4 files. All Audible files will have the ā€œDescriptionā€ tag for example.

+1 for this, but in the interests of agile development, perhaps focus on fewer tags initially and iterate? e.g. adding composer tag as a start would be the biggest win for classical music fans IMO.

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You would think something like Composer would be super easy and a quick win, but even something this straightforward runs immediately into some of the design limitations of the Plex internal music database: because Composer is tagged on an individual track level, but Plex has albums as a separate database table, you’d have to figure out a way to roll this metadata up to the Album level.

Do we then get multiple ā€œAlbum Composersā€ for the many classical albums with works from multiple composers? Or does Plex list such an album under a new entry ā€œVarious Composersā€? Would a search for Bach in the album view return only albums where Bach is the sole composer, or also albums where he is one of the composers?

This is one of the reasons I want to see a ā€œworksā€ view, and a Composer Detail page (akin to Artist Detail) so a composer’s detail page can show a list of works, regardless of which albums they appear on. Gonna have to work up a mockup of that.

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Ideally you’d want ā€œPersonā€ pages which include all tracks where he’s Artist, Album Artist, Composer, Conductor, Producer, Remixer, etc. Rolled up/collapsible by Album.

I believe Emby implement it like that? It’s also how discogs, rateyourmusic, etc do it.

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I didn’t see the suggestion that made FOUR years ago until I sent a post asking for help about the multiple artists problem.

It’s hard to believe that after such a long time, these valuable suggestions have not been implemented by plex which would make the Player much great ļ¼šļ¼‰

(if I hadn’t read this suggestion, I would think that my tags editor has problems or doesn’t match the plex official tags reading standar.)

The defect of this music tag is really (one of ?) the biggest problem of music function module

I hope plex will attach importance to this problem and fix it as soon as possible to improve the user experience.

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