Music play queue by musician

[okurokonfire 4]

Lets start with an example.

There's a german musician Michael Kiske. He was a singer in Helloween(some, but not all albums), Supared, Place Vendome, Unisonic, Kiske/Somerville, he has solo career and is featured in many albums by other bands(like, Avantasia, Indigo Dying..)

Is there a way to set library so i can easily start playlist/play queue with every sond where he is featured, either as a part of the band, or as a features guest? Adding him as artist/album artist will not work in all of the cases, as there need to be clear distinguishing between songs, where he is a part of a band, and songs where he is a guest(already placed him as one of the artists).

The question is general: i want to set up play queues by musicians, not just him and not just vocalists.

[user24 315]

Hi, Unless you have (e.g.) "Michael Kiske" as an entity somewhere within your embedded metadata or Emby tags for the relevant Albums/Songs, then Emby will not 'know' that he is part of any associated musical bands/groups.

If you don't want to use embedded Artist and/or Album Artist fields/tags there are at least two standard ways to achieve what you want:

• Collections - good for a customised 'Albums' view and can be played/shuffled as you wish
• Playlists - good for a customised 'Songs' view and can be played/shuffled as you wish

It takes a little bit of time to set these up, but isn't that difficult. (This could be relatively easier to do automatically with the Smart Playlists 2.0 plugin, but I'm not sure if it is working correctly at the moment, and may not be updated further, as similar core functionality is reportedly coming soon from Emby).

There are also other less obvious (but still workable) methods that could be used:

• Genres - will be at the top of all relevant Artist pages for easy access
• Tags - also useful to group different items together
• Roontracktag - an embedded metadata tag that can be set for individual songs, that Emby will import into the Tag field.
• Album Artist - use the multi-field functionality (embedded metadata or Emby tag)
• Artist - use the multi-field functionality (embedded metadata or Emby tag)

That's a few ideas to get you started. All of the above will work for any person-type you want (singer, guitarist, drummer, composer, conductor...). Perhaps experiment with some of these and see how they function for you? You could just use one method, however, setting up a combination of two or more can be very versatile and give good cross-referencing and playback options from various pages/views in your library.

I think I've tried most of the above for obtaining different groupings. MusicBrainz IDs is possibly another option, but I haven't tried that for custom groupings as yet. When Emby implements its 'Smart' functions there may even be more ways???

Good luck with finding a good method. Cheers!

Additionally, I would recommend first trying out Collections and also the Group By function within Collections for different views. If you only want basic song lists to queue and play though, then just create Playlists.

Edited October 7, 2024 by user24
added Additionally extra info

[Luke 42079]

Hi, good news is that we are working on a smart playlists feature that should help with this.