Possible to use only one Artist?

Hi, looking for some help. I recently made the switch to Plex for all my music needs, and it is having issues matching my music using default settings.

By default, Picard is naming all Artists in the album, but Plex only likes there to be one.

“Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard - The Dark Knight”
needs to become
“Hans Zimmer - The Dark Knight”

Appreciate any help with this! Thanks~

Howdy there - the field Plex uses for “primary” artist matching is “Album Artist” (the tag is titled “albumartist”).

The “Artist” field on the other hand can be just about anything - Plex won’t throw a fit (generally) when matching based on this one. This is where I keep featured artist credits.

Just note that Plex doesn’t handle additional artist credits very well overall, but there’s even more strange behavior if they are not separated by a semi-colon.

I also use a script to replace “feat.”, “featuring” and “with” with a semi-colon:

With all that said, sometimes two artists are credited at the release level, and you just have to make a personal decision on who you want Plex to identify as the primary artist by whittling the “albumartist” tag down to one artist.

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Thanks for the reply, so what exactly is your solution to get just 1 artist in the “albumartist” tag?

Is your linked script handling that?

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Nah, the scripts shown just clean up the artist tag so they use semicolons instead of English join phrases like “feat.”.

I’ve considered writing a script that removes all characters after the first semicolon in the albumartist field, but it’s not all that often of an occurrence so I just manually remove the additional artists by hand. I could play around and share a snippet if you’d find it useful, though.

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Yes please, sounds useful!

For sure, here’s one way to do it:

  1. Head to the Plugins section and add the “Additional Artists Variables” plugin.

  2. Create a script with the following:

$set(albumartist,%_artists_album_primary_std%))

This will grab the first credited artist in the albumartist field and overwrite any additional artists. The main caveat being that I’m pretty sure this will only work on albums in MusicBrainz that can be matched.

It’s also grabbing the “standardized” artist name. If you want it to pull the artist “as credited”, like if an artist released something under a moniker, you can change the variable to “_artists_album_primary_cred”.

More info on the plugin mentioned can be read here: picard-plugins/README.md at 2.0_RDS_Plugins · rdswift/picard-plugins · GitHub

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