Various Artist Compilation & Track Artist

Plex Labs
1

Hi - looking for some clarity on if this is possible or not. I read some of the old post around this topic but not really sure I understand what is possible today, some posts mentions it’s solved but I am probably doing something wrong as it’s not working for me

Basically, how do I need to tag multiple artists on a track which is part of a “Various Artists” “album” so that I can find the tracks they appear on using the search function?

I have singles that I have grouped into an album by naming all the tracks with the same “Album” title and used “Various Artists” as the “Album Artist”. I have prefer local metadata ticked

The “Artist” field is separated by “\\”

If the file type is .flac and has 2 artists separated by “\\” they seem to pop up in the plex search results and are displayed as “artist1;artist2” (all one long string with no spaces". I’m OK enough with this but would prefer if it showed “artist1, artist2” (so that it’s not one long string and each artist is separated by a space. Is that possible? Do I need to change the “\\” to something else to accomplish what I am looking for? What would that be?

Now if the file is .mp3 and tagged the same as above I only see “artist1” Is there anyway to get “artist1, artist2” or even “artist1;artist2”

Would it make a difference if the tracks had the MusicBrainz info filled in, which of the MusicBrainz tag would be the most relevant in this case (Track Id, Release Id, Recording Id, Artist Id etc)

From what I read when the Plex database was originnaly setup it wasn’t done in a way which would support multi artist information and it would take a ton of work for this to be done now. I would rather not rehash what was done in the past I am really just trying to understand if it’s possible to tweak anything to get the results to show in search.

Open to any suggestions, I am definitely no pro so please simplify any possible tweaks for me - Thanks!

2

I think there is a bug in ffmpeg, which is used in Plex, which prevents it from reading more than the first parameter in a tag in an MP3 file. I have seen others report exactly this FLAC/MP3 discrepancy before and that was the explanation at that time.

It’s been like this for a long time and I would not hold your breath waiting for a fix.

3

Here’s a thread about the ffmpeg bug. It looks like someone from Plex submitted a fix to ffmpeg, but it doesn’t appear to have been implemented:

4

Thanks for the background. That genre thread is an interesting read.