Various Artists Not Appearing - Think I'm following the rules

[ralaustin-plex_yahoo.com]

Server Version#: 1.21.0.3711
Player Version#: Windows 1.24.0.1483-714cba36

My media player sysetm (i.e. the PC hardware) crashed and I decided to take the opportunity to fix my Plex environment, as I was not following some of the preferred tagging and folder structure (and hobbled along). I have now fixed that - I think.

My issue is that when I go to the Music Library View, and have the filter as “A_Genre, Artists, By Title” then the Artists from the ‘Various Artists’ Albums don’t appear.

If I filter by “A_Genre, Albums, By Album Artist” then the albums that contain various artists show up as expected (i.e. each album cover is shown and the album artist is sorted as ‘Various Artists’). Clicking on one of the albums appropriately shows the songs in that album with their name and the individual song artist.

My expectation would be that Plex in the “A_Genre, Artists, By Title” view would either show a generic “Various Artists” icon that I can click on to see the other songs of that genre, or (ideally) be smart enough to pull the track artist of these songs and display them on the screen that I could then select the artist and drill down to their song list. Maybe my expectation is incorrect?

I have confirmed that the ‘Album Artist’ meta data is appropriately stated as “Various Artists” and that the ‘Artist’ tag is for the actual singer(s) of that song.

Thanks

[beckfield]

I think this explains what you’re seeing:

• The “Artist” view in Plex is actually “Album Artist.”
• When viewing by “Genre, Artists, By Title,” it’s likely that the genres attached to the VA albums have not been attributed to the ‘Various Artists’ artist.

If you edit your “Various Artists” artist and look at the “Tags” page, is there anything in the “Genres” field? If not, the points above explain what you’re seeing. If you add, say, “Pop” to the VA Artist’s Genre field, then set the view to “Pop” “Artists” “By Title,” the VA artist should show up.

There are some Requests in the Feature Suggestions forum regarding this. It’s included in this request for better tag support, but more specifically in this one.

[ralaustin-plex_yahoo.com]

Thanks for the reply. You were correct in that ‘Various Artists’ did not have genre tags. This is odd, since Plex properly populated the ‘regular artists’ (e.g. Frank Sinatra has the tag ‘Standards’ and that is based upon the tag I used for his songs). Various Artists was blank, so I added a genre to it.

But this raised another problem I had seen. And this may be just how plex is. I added the ‘Christmas’ tag to Various Artists. Now, when I go to “Christmas (Genre Selection), Artists, By Title” the Various Artists icon now appears. Great; however, when I click on it, the next screen shows EVERY album that has Various Artists as the Album Artist (Christmas albums, Broadway albums, Kids albums, etc.). This is even though at the top it says “Various Artists” with a subtext just below it of “Christmas”. So, it appears from this view the genre filtering no longer happens, which is what I am looking for.

I guess I could go through and create other tags to replace “Various Artists” (e.g. “Standards Artists”, “Christmas Artists”, etc.), but it is counter to what I would expect the genre view to achieve and I’m hoping there is a better way to approach this.

Thoughts or a better approach is appreciated.

So, I go back to, my ideal request of plex, when it sees an album in which the songs artist does not match the directory name, then it shows the song artists for that song’s genre (which is what I thought I would achieve by following Plex’s folder structure). Or, alternatively, that if Various Artists shows up, then the genre filter is smart enough to keep the filter when I go into the ‘Various Artists’ group.

[Ten minutes later] I added another genre tag to various artists and now I see that the text under ‘Various Artists,’ per my picture above, now shows both tags, so that’s just showing the genres assigned for that artist. My genre filter is no longer active.

[beckfield]

That’s correct, the filters only apply at the top level. So “Christmas (Genre Selection), Artists, By Title” will show you all artists that have a Christmas album, but opening the Artist Detail page, you will see all of that artist’s albums.

If you just want to see an artist’s Christmas albums, you’ll have to use the Custom Filters:

Set the library to ‘Albums’ view.
Select ‘Custom Filter…’ from the ‘All’ menu.

Set up a filter like this (that’s not a Christmas album below, I just added the tag to get this screenshot):

If Various Artists had 2 or more genre tags, they would all be shown below the artist name (you must not be using Plex Web, which explains why the UI looks a bit different).

[ralaustin-plex_yahoo.com]

Thanks for the pointer to the Custom Filter and that seems like it will fit my needs. I understand the logic being used by Plex; I was just expecting a bit more ‘usability’ consideration. Thank you also for the pointers for the suggestions for Track Genre support. I originally thought that was how Plex worked, but really it is just at the album level (in which it appears Plex pulls that from the genre tags of the tracks for both the album and the artist (except for Various Artists apparently!). I promoted that suggestion as it would greatly speed up playlist generation.

Thumbs up for your support

Paul