This seems like a really basic feature in just about every music player. Many, many albums have collections of tracks in multiple genres. Why doesn’t Plex manage genres by track?
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This functionality has recently been removed, along with track mood and collection.
I use mood/genre filtering to create smart playlists. In essence smart playlists are now worthless - they are stuck in time, tracks cannot be added or removed. What a terrible “upgrade.”
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It’ll be returning… Plex is actively working on this based on a different metadata provider.
I’ve been waiting, a little less than patiently, for the new Plex music metadata, and all of the great things it is supposed to bring us. It seems that no one really knows (or can tell us) what exactly the new features are, and if some of the old ones are returning.
but in another thread, @ bengeorge, a Plex employee, stated that “moods” are being moved to Albums and Artists. I don’t know if we’ve ever had the ability to filter by track genre, only by album. Until a lot of the music features vanished, I never even tried to filter or create collections, Plex just worked.
I’m hoping that this whole process is taking a little longer than a lot of us expected is because Plex wants to get it right the first time, and it will include track based genres, moods and collections, not based solely on Albums or Artists.
I was referring to genre filtering, my apologies for not being more explicit. (And I may still have it wrong after all that…)
No apology required. In fact, mine are due for a bit of a rant. Just venting, frustrated over the length of time that all of the features we used to have are gone, and the delay in getting them back. 
I didn’t realize that the ability had existed! That’s great it’s coming, because track-based logic is all that’s keeping me shackled to iTunes still.
I look forward to seeing how much metadata you open up! Track-specific genres and moods will be terrific. I currently manage these all in iTunes and periodically copy my smart playlists into manual playlists and then import them into Plex. A pain in the neck, to be sure.
Moods is much more useful than genres for my current needs, so I’m excited to be able to start tagging by that.
Once we do get track-specific metadata, can we export the work we put into Plex? While Plex is great, I’ve been at this (digital asset management) for enough (25+) years not to trust huge amounts of manual work into somebody else’s product. They come, and they go, but my metadata needs to live beyond.
Please don’t get super excited as I might not have my facts straight… but I hope know more soon.
This is not so much a metadata provider thing as much as a database design issue - if you look into its sql database Plex has Albums as a separate table with fields like Genre, Year, Mood and artwork as Album-level attributes.
Ideally the Album table would not exist, and Plex would dynamically group tracks into albums (inheriting all track-level fields). I hope Plex will some day in the future overhaul their db design to do this (it would fix sooo many issues, V/A compilations for a start) but it’s a major change that will undoubtedly break things on many levels.
The new update doesn’t appear to address track metadata. Bummer.
sorry
I really hate the plex music database design.
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I have thousands of ripped CDs (yes literally THOUSANDS) of CD that all have various artists and various genres on each CD. I’ve struggled for years to properly catalog these mp3s in Plex. It’s a losing battle as Plex just flat out ignores fields in the id3 tag. Here’s the thing though, this shouldn’t be hard. The mp3s are ALL properly tagged. Every mp3 track has a title, artist and album tag but Plex ignores it and makes the artist “Various Artists” for every track. So annoying.
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Albums do not have Genres, period. The individual tracks on the album do.
It might make sense to tag Album with the artist attribute but only if EVERY track on the album is by the same artist. Otherwise, this is just a wrong way to think about albums.
Plex should be able to read the id3 tag and figure out the artist on each track and album tag in each track if the file is tagged correctly.
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I have only hundreds of Albums, but I’ve taken great care to tag everything meticulously, and having a hard time moving out of iTunes into our brave new world of oversimplified music streaming. Not to mention a lot of my content (and I bet yours) isn’t available anywhere else, for streaming or even for detecting metadata.
I use Plex to stream to my 7 chromecast audios, and the best I can do is periodically sync playlists from iTunes (that I have to manually copy from smart playlists). I have one chromecast on the TV, but that’s used more for streaming outside content than Plex.
I’m looking for another home-based server I can use with my chromecasts. There aren’t many. I’m enough of a developer I’ve also started looking into making my own casting server . . .
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Exactly. I’ve been a DJ since the late 80s and I’ve subscribed to half a dozen DJ services over the years. I subscribed to PromoOnly, ERG Music and a few other that would send out monthly CDs to subscribers. That was from the early 90s until everything went to download only a few years back, so yes that’s a LOT of CDs. They’re all completely not usable in Plex.
You’re right though, much of the music isn’t available on streaming services and some of the music was never released anywhere other than DJ services.
Over the last few days I’ve been making a lot of noise about Plex and especially id3 tags. I’m now using it a LOT more. I have Chromecast, SmartTVs, iPhones, iPads, Android tablets, FireTV, Roku and probably a few others.
Plex really is my best option right now, but these media database issues are going to make me start looking elsewhere.
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Exactly, but this is not how the Plex internal database was set up originally, and it now proves very hard to change without breaking lots of stuff.
Year and Genre should indeed be track-level attributes, and ideally a music library dynamically builds albums by grouping tracks from whatever your db query returns with the same Album Artist + Album Name combo.
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