Are there any improvements with the new musicbrainz integration or is this just a new way to fill the old metadata structure?
Nevermind… I took a look into the plex .xml files.
The artist tag is named “artist” and not “artists” so I assume there is no change at this point.
Other things like genres are named “genres”.
Confirmed this by looking into the database.
Interpret seems to be saved under “original_title” column in database. (on the track row)
So there isn’t really a structure noticeable to save multiple artists
The changes seem to be musicbrainz integration and better handling of refreshed metadata,
ie the end of the “Plex Dance”. The database structure (and its limitations) is still the same.
I have a large (2500+ Albums/box sets) classical and opera collection, as well as a few hundred Broadway (original cast/London cast/revival cast/off Broadway cast/concert cast) recordings (and hundreds of pop, rock, lounge, swing, etc) iTunes does a passable job, but Plex is useless for classical. I would pay good money for a Plex server that handled classical with tags for composer, genre, performer/soloist, conductor, period, etc.
And for some reason, when reading the embedded metadata, Plex has decided Stephen Sondheim is the source of all music and assigned him as Artist for about 500 albums, although I am curious what Queen: Night at the Opera by Stephen Sondheim sounds like.
I would also like to add my utmost support for this request. I was mistakenly under the assumption that Plex already operated with all tags in this thread being taken into account. It was quite a let down to discover there was no good way to catalog my multi-artist songs/albums. I was far more disappointed to realize that classical music is practically impossible to import in any useful way. I am not willing to make the jump to a full-time PMS until I can actually import my well tagged music, and I’m sure that I’m not alone.
I am in the same quandry as Marty69 - I have an extensive classical music collection and Plex looked like a perfect fit for using with our Synology NAS but this is a huge stumbling block that I cannot search by composer - in my opinion more important than artist in some cases. If this is not implemented soon I will have to move to another, less sophisticated system - but however slick the front, it is no good if the engine is poor. Please Plex add this option before I leave.
Same situation… Synology NAS, large classical collection, etc. I moved all of my popular music into Plex (a) because I hate iTunes and (b) because Plex also looked like an ideal solution for my classical music (which iTunes also doesn’t deal with well). But I want to be able to search by composer, and tags (performer, etc)… So far I dont have any more than i had with iTunes
The thing is, while it’s a bit complex, iTunes/Music.app really is quite good on the metadata front. For one, it handles genre, year, artist and composer on a track level (this is already where most music library software fails, especially Plex), and it always uses tags as the primary source, and doesn’t overwrite things with some scraped info from the internet.
There are still gaps in iTunes (no support for multiple genres or artists, no way to separately store original year and release year, and the classical music “Work/Movement“ tags are a bit of a mess UI-wise), but I’d be perfectly happy if Plex was just a simple streaming front end for the iTunes DB. Obviously that’s not realistic, as PMS runs on many platforms like Linux/etc that doesn’t have iTunes.
The direction where Plex is clearly going, is that they negotiate access to a few online databases with content (imdb, tvdb, and now for music, MusicBrainz), PMS matches your files against that, and then downloads the metadata in those online databases and calls it a day. The metadata is not meant to be user curated or based on local tags.
According to one of the devs track-based mood editing is coming back in the March 10 release for the web client with a media player update following. Maybe they’ll add some other track-based organization with that release as well.
The odd thing about Plex is that it does store some information on a track level (like artist) but you can’t use it: track artists aren’t included in search or filter for example.
Sort of like you can SEE the names of audio tracks on movies (commentary etc) when you get info on a movie but you can’t see the names when you select the audio or subtitle track in the application. So PLEX knows what it is, but won’t show you.
If Plex actually used the track artist info, it would be possible to create “Smart” playlists for Enya, that would change dynamically as content was added/deleted. As it is right now, that’s not possible. In the example above, you have to add each item one at a time to a “dumb” playlist - you can not select all of them at once. You also cannot add the individual tracks (or albums) to an existing “smart” playlist that has all of the Enya albums.
The track artist is only visible if the album artist is different (various artists, for example), and it is not a field you can search by in the filter view. For some reason, the track artist is always shown with m4a files, but even so, it’s still not a field that can be used in a filter.
Just another reason to have real “ID3 Tag Support for ROBUST music library organization”
No offense to you, @certuna, but iTunes is a massive resource hog among other issues I have with it.
Actually, Musicbrainz is a user-curated database, but I hear what you’re saying.
That being said, I often personally take issue with the naming conventions used for certain albums (which can be unnecessarily verbose to distinguish one album release from another); or including umpteen artists in the Artist field. Don’t even get me started on the arbitrary nature of genre labels. I don’t need Baroque Classical separated from Impressionist Classical, and I don’t need to specify the difference between Alternative and Rock.
So I very often do re-tag my audio content, be it music or audiobooks—because the labeling system one uses should be the one that works best for the type and amount of content they have.
Yeah, iTunes is a bit like using Photoshop or Excel if you only need MS Paint or Calculator, but for managing bigger libraries the number of alternatives becomes rather limited, esp if you want to do things like scripting.
Anyway, it’s mainly the way iTunes handles metadata I’d like Plex to implement/copy, not the actual software itself.
Does anyone know if there is an update? The lack of support for (at a bare minimum) Composer is very surprising. I am in the process of making a transition from Music (since the iTunes->Music debacle broke my collection entirely), but it honestly never even occurred to me to check support for something as basic as this Appreciate all the work people in this thread have put in to figuring out workarounds and to making it clear that this really is a critical feature - not just for Classical fans, but for a whole swathe of other genres (including pop, rock etc.).
While we are talking about fixing and using tags, can we get Plex to do the logical thing and actually USE the tags it has properly?
Its completely ridiculous that I have a compilation album where each track has the artist set correctly (it even shows it) and when i search for the artist, these tracks don’t appear.
Its a significant failing of the usage of the tags Plex already recognizes.
Searching track artists can be done, if you use the 3rd party player Prism. It’s unfortunate that their own client apps can’t do it, but that’s how it is. They also can’t handle compilation albums with tracks from different years, or with tracks from different genres. Plex has only been developed/tested for albums where all songs are from one year, by one artist, in one genre. When that’s not the case, things break, either in scanning, search, filter or UI/display.
The way things are heading, Plex isn’t very interested anymore in supporting locally maintained tags, the new concept is that only basic artist/album name info is needed to match albums to the MusicBrainz online database, and Plex then pulls in all the metadata from there, bypassing whatever is in the local tags.
This is great for people with badly tagged files, not so great for people where the tags are more accurate/extensive than MusicBrainz.
iTunes, being an Apple product, is limited in advanced features and is generally restrictive of being accessed by devices outside of Apple’s walled garden. I would say using iTunes is like insisting on using MSPaint when what a project calls for is GIMP.
