Let me start by saying the new music libraries are pretty awesome. The metadata that is being pulled (artist bios, album reviews, etc.) is excellent. However, I’m having a weird issue that is somewhat hard to fix.
I use embedded tags, and like to think that everything is tagged perfectly, but I guess Plex doesn’t agree.
We’ll start with this example: The A Star Is Born Soundtrack by Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper. The album is credited to both individuals, so I have the albumartist tag as Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper and the artist tag for each track to reflect the specific artist performing that track. I also have the album Joanne by Lady Gaga in my library. At first I noticed that Plex had both albums listed under one artist matched to Lady Gaga but named Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper. Trying to fix this had proved a little difficult. I can unmatch everything and get them all separate, but if I try to rematch Lady Gaga & Bradley Cooper with the Last.fm agent, it will match that artist temporarily, but then immediately combine them again? I have to leave one of them unmatched, I suppose.
I initially had the same trouble with Ray Lamontagne and Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs, but I was able to keep those matched separately after some luck.
I’ve noticed Bob Dylan and the Band gets matched as Bob Dylan. I have yet to try to correct that, as chaos most likely will ensue. Same thing with Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead – that’s currently just matched to Bob Dylan.
I know music can libraries can vary and it’s hard to offer a solution for all, but these are separate album artists that are being combined. If they are to be combined, it should be for sorting purposes only – not change the name of the album artist in the process.
At the present time, the new music agent doesn’t deal very well at all with albums by multiple artists. It will invariably match the album to the first artist in the tag. They’ve hinted they are working on a fix…
Any way, the only solution I found was to “Split Apart” at the artist level. If I remember correctly, you end up with two artists with the same name. You then correct the artist name that’s wrong to have both names, and then match the album manually.
You probably won’t have any bio info, but the album should match up with the reviews and any other goodies the new system gives us.
Not sure what you mean by “split apart,” but I can get them separated if I just change the artist name on the album. It will then move it to a new artist, but if I try to match that artist, then it seems to just rematch it back to where it was originally. I’m just leaving it for now.
Very comprehensive feature request! Sadly, it looks like you’ve been waiting awhile…
It has me rethinking how I should tag my classical music, however. I’ve lost a lot of sleep over that!
Doesn’t matter how you did, as long as you have it more or less fixed. There’s probably a few more ways, too, but the best method would be a fix by Plex to actually use the album artist tag we have embedded in the files.
I have a problem with artist merging that is similar enough that I didn’t think a new thread was necessary. In this new server version, when I merge two artists, Plex renames the artist field of the merged artist so that it matches the artist it is being merged with. With the old version, Plex would simply merge the artists but keep the embedded artist tags. This is the preferred behavior. An example: I merged “Sons of Kyuss” with “Kyuss” and Plex renamed “Sons of Kyuss” to “Kyuss” to match the rest of the Kyuss albums. Before, when I would do this on the old server version, Plex would merge the two but “Sons of Kyuss” would remain the artist for the respective album. I tried manually renaming the artist field of the Sons of Kyuss album to “Sons of Kyuss” but that simply caused Plex to break the merge and I was back to the beginning. Please help.
I never had to do any real manual work before, because in almost every case, I don’t want to merge anything. If the album artist is different, I have them different for a reason. However, if it were to happen, what you mention is exactly how I would want it to happen.
Yeah, it used to be very useful for artists that release albums under different pseudonyms. For example, MF Doom (King Geedorah, Viktor Vaughn, etc.). With the old Plex, I could merge all of his albums into the MF Doom artist page, but his pseudonyms would be retained for the albums. If I were to do that with the current Plex version, it would just change the artist for all of them to MF Doom. If I wanted that, I would just have MF Doom as the artist for all the albums! I don’t understand why this change was made to the way merging works.
Were there any changes made to music libraries? I had deleted my music library and was trying some other solutions when I decided to add it back into Plex. Things are now much more preferable.
Album artists seems to be left alone – or at least not merged together. Bob Dylan and the Band and Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead seem to be matched to Bob Dylan as they have that artist info, but they are separate and the album artist tags have been left alone.
