Wrestling With Complation Albums.

General Discussions
1

I’ve been searching a while for an answer to this. I have yet to find an answer and much of the information seems outdated so maybe I can get a very clear answer .

Is there a way to make Plex obey the compilation bit in the ID3 tag?

My music is meticulously tagged and I have the artist view working in Plex finally the way I want. Every single artist in my music library is listed. I’m OK that they may have one song and one compilation. I dint like using “various artists” and find it an unhelpful way to view my collection.

I understand that some people don’t prefer this and only want artists with entire albums to show.

Obviously you know where I’m going with this, because the nightmare happens when I move over to album view I have hundreds of the same album listed, one for each artist on the compilation album.

As it stands now it’s like I have to choose one or the other is I can’t find an option which allows me to view both album and artist the way I want to. I would also rather not have to edit my tags.

Is there a way to just display a compilation album a single time when an album view and still keep the artist showing up during artist view? It seems the ideal situation would be a toggle to allow Plex to ignore and/or sort on the basis of the compilation bit.

Another option would be to have settings specific to the view, so you can use album artist during album view and regular artist during artist view. this would require more effort but I’m willing to do it if it gets me where I want to be. But as far as I know Plex only uses album artist and there’s no way to change this.

I suspect from what I gathered , that my only choices Are to edit the tag and change them to various artists , thereby losing the functionality I enjoy in artist view. All the information I saw there was rather old and I was hoping that something has changed in the last couple of years, perhaps adding the functionality I recognize the compilation bed or to change the fields by which Plex sorts .

So if this is not possible with Plex, is it possible using a different player such as Plex for Kodi, or some other front end. Kodi has a lot more customizable options or maybe somebody has created software specifically designed for music, with all the functions dedicated music player would have.

2

Is this a ghost town or what? I hereby declare Plex the Marvel Heroes of media software.

It’s only a matter of time …

3

What you want cannot be done in Plex, currently.

Either you have an Album Artist that is identical for all tracks of an album (it doesn’t have to be ‘Various Artists’ though)
or
your albums will continue to get fractured.

The ‘compilation flag’ is a proprietary thing of iTunes. It is not supported in Plex.

4

The compilation flag is proprietary? In Flac? A format they do not even support? Every tagging program I have uses it. I don’t think you need to pay Apple to support it.

Regardless, it is a pretty majpr issue for music lovers and Kodi makes it work somehow. The code changes needed to make this possible are very small. But is seems like Plex is not for music lovers any more and development has all but stopped for new features.

I mean seriously, how hard would it be to implement a “use album artist or track artist” for sorting. Its 2 lines of code and changes nothing about the actual database. Kodi already has the code. The let the flag be different for album and artist sort. that’s it. Done!

It makes me wonder what, if any, priorities the Plex team actually has. I stopped paying for the thing after 2 years of trying to get sync to work for my mobile devices. That was one of 2 paid features at the time, and it never worked, ios or android.

I loved Plex, so its very sad to see it stall and watch the rest of the world pass it by.

5

I’m experiencing the same challenge. I would love to be able to migrate my music listening over to Plex, but the issue of not being able to group compilations in Album view is a major headache.