Using correct artist match in music library to get additional artist info in premium music library.

General Discussions
1

A few troubles getting the music library to work. I can’t seem to get Plex to honor the matches I pick in the match dialog screen.

A little background:

  1. for ‘artist’ tag I use First, Last for naming (i.e. Bruce Springsteen, or The Who)
  2. for ‘album artist’’ tag I use Last, First for naming (i.e. Springsteen, Bruce, or Who, The), so that the library main view is sorted correctly (i.e. Bruce Springsteen in the ‘S’ rather than ‘B’ category). Also, I have to use this naming to be compatible with JRiver, which is necessary for some hardware I have at home.
  3. I also have Plex using embedded tags as all my files are extensively tagged.

Plex appears to use the ‘album artist’ tag to pull down additional info in the premium libraries AND expects it to be in First, Last format. So with my schema nothing matches. If I try to correct the match and choose the correct artist, nothing changes. I still do not get the biography, upcoming concerts, etc…

Seems to me that choosing the correct match should lead to getting that additional info, so either the match is not ‘taking’, or Plex doesn’t really use the match info for anything. Is there a way to force the expected behavior?

Another option would be to use the ‘Sort Album Artist’ tag, but that does’n’t seem to work either. If I use First, Last in ‘album artist’ and Last, First in ‘sort album artist’ that things seem fine in Plex, but it screws up sorting based on ‘sort album artist’ elsewhere.

2

  1. follow this guide to set some parameters https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/227541/howto-configure-plex-to-use-embedded-metadata-music

  2. the only relevant field for fetching artist data is ‘AlbumArtist’ And you are already using it correctly.

some more music-related tips
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1050849/#Comment_1050849

https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1093611/#Comment_1093611

3

Thanks Otto.

  1. I did have things set-up like shown in that guide.

  2. I still don’t get why if I explicitly tell whom to match to, that Plex ignores that and doesn’t pull relevant info.

My solution has been to alter JRiver to do what I need, as it is much more flexible, and just change the sort Album Artist in Plex, as needed. The ‘sort album artist’ field in Plex does not actually relate to the tags, it seems to be just a local sort field, because that tag is in my files and not respected. So what we really need is a way for Plex to actually leverage the tags present in files, not just half-ass it.