Server Version#: 1.31
Player Version#: n/a
My music media server is completely messed up right now. It is listing thousands of tracks with the album artist “AC/DC” and this is not set in the local metadata on the files. I tried to checkmark “prefer local metadata” but it does nothing to correct this. How can I force it to rescan metadata locally to provide correct data? I’ve used MusicBrainz Picard to set the metadata.
I’d like an answer myself. One of my Plex servers went through a period of applying Andrew Lloyd-Webber to everything (and alternately slapping the Godzilla 50th Anniversary Collection art randomly on albums.)
You’ve tried a full library metadata refresh?
Since most of my albums are compilations with various artists, I guess I’m just S.O.L. then. There’s a reason “That’s what they call music” titles are so popular now and it is ridiculous that the service would ignore Album Artist tags in the tracks. It’s a flawed system if it expects all the tracks to be stored under the original album the track was released under.
2 Likes
Not sure what you mean by this.
Plex pretty much requires “Album Artist” tags to be present.
1 Like
Sorry, I guess I misunderstood one of the responses. I got the impression that 1. All the artists in a folder had to belong to be the same and 2. The folder name of the parent folder had to belong to just one artist so a compilation album is a no-go.
Are you saying if I update empty album artist tags to equal the artist tag that it should correct itself?
correct. Album Artist, that is.
The folder name belongs to the Album Artist.
So compilations go into the folder “Various Artists”.
Quoted for truth.
Do it this way and it will work out. You may have to “Plex dance” your files, or just delete/recreate your library if you don’t have a lot of customization already in place.
Any errors in Album Artist tagging, or not using the magic phrase “Various Artists” correctly, can cause problems. It’s fragile. Yes, it sucks.
So just so we are clear, “Prefer local metadata” does not favor the actual default music file metadata stored in the file so MusicBrainz Picard will not help anyone much. You should really put a disclaimer there because it implies I should be able to get the results I want through the file metadata that every other app uses.
It looks like I need to create a folder “Various Artists” under my main music library folder and because Plex refuses to use information from the tracks themselves, move most of my albums into that. At least I can use Picard to a lot of the heavy lifting on this I guess.
Yes, it does. But the folder structure must still be observed.
But the folder structure must still be observed.
Unlike other music apps, like Groove, Microsoft, etc.
Anyway, so i’ve moved a bunch of files around to satisfy this primitive requirement and now my playlists are all broken.
Please tell me there is a simple way to export the playlist and update to fix it. Am I going to really have to search for hundreds of songs to add to new playlists?
Yes it does.
So why does this happen?:
After moving "Music\Best songs of the 60’s 70’s 80’s and 90’s\Best 100 Hits of the 80s" to "Music\Various Artists\Best songs of the 60’s 70’s 80’s and 90’s\Best 100 Hits of the 80s" . In MusicBrainz, it shows it is correctly assigned to artist=Kim Carnes, album=Mistaken Identity, and Album Artist=Kim Carnes. In Plex, when I click on Edit icon, it shows Album Artist=Various Artists, Album=Thriller, Title=Bette Davis Eyes, and Artist=(empty).
The values listed from MusicBrainz Picard are in the original value column (unchanged in the next column over), so why don’t they appear correctly in Plex?
Album Artist is incorrectly assigned in this case. The Album Artist has to be the same in all tracks of an album. Compilation or not.
Album Artist is incorrectly assigned in this case. The Album Artist has to be the same in all tracks of an album. Compilation or not.
So how can I fix it? The metadata is correct in both Windows Explorer (showing the correct album and artist) but is being ignored by Plex because it is in a folder of various artists??
In other words, it does not use the metadata. It ignores it. At least it isn’t saying everything is AC/DC or 5th Dimension as the artist anymore so there’s that. lol.
If you have an album like this:
/music/Various Artists/Some Compilation (2000)
Then, for every track in Some Compilation (2000) the Album Artist must be set to Various Artists.
But it looks like your directory structure has an extra level of depth that Plex won’t like:
Music\Various Artists\Best songs of the 60’s 70’s 80’s and 90’s\Best 100 Hits of the 80s
Plex wants that to look like this:
/Music/Various Artists/Best 100 Hits of the 80s
Unfortunately how Plex wants things does not allow us to set up any folder structure we want.
You can either have it your way, or you can have Plex happy. It sucks but it’s just how it is.
Seems like it is pretty limited unfortunately. I think I may play around with the options menu and have it copy the files out to new folders created based on artist and album information inside the tracks after creating a playlist from the existing folder album so to preserve all the songs together for later listening. This seems like a better option than to update a track to “Various artists” for the Album artist in those folders.
Try anything that works for you, but if you do not use Various Artists as the Album Artist you will see problems in Plex.
It is limited, it’s just how it is.
Man, you’d despair at how my libraries are organized. For most of the various artists stuff, though, I do have various artists folders, including the big one named as Various Artists (there’s several others inside library folders such as my progressive directory.)
It honestly seems to make little difference in some instances — I have compilation sets mixed in with regular albums in a number of directories (for example, the I’m A Freak, Baby sets in the rock library) and they show up correctly.
So I went through the task of getting it to Music\Artist\Album\Tracks and in some cases Music\Artist\Album\CD#\Tracks… I have a folder Music\Various Artists\ and have album folders under there, but they still are broken. I have multiple copies of the same album showing under “Albums” in my music Libraries.
For example, “Now That’s what I call music 1994” is showing up as seven separate albums in the music library when sorted by Libraries and by name. In folder structure, it is saved as “Music\Various Artists\Now That’s What I Call Music! 1994 (1994) \CD1” for CD1. I have the following tags in MusicBrainz Picard:
Title: (different across 39 items)
Artist: (different across 39 items)
Album: Now That’s What I Call Music! 1994
Track Number: (different across 39 items)
Length: (different across 39 items)
Date: (different across 39 items)
Album Artists: Various Artists
Album Artists Sort Order: Various Artists
Genre: Contemporary Pop
Release Status: official
Release Type: compilation
The first Album entry in Plex for this has the following information when viewed in the music library on Plex:
Disc 1
16 Girls and Boys - Blur
17 Trouble - Shampoo
Disc 2
4 Renaissance (radio mix) - M People
7 Come In Out of the Rain - Wendy Moten
8 The Perfect Year (radio mix) - Dina Carroll
12 Return to Innocense - Enigma
I confirmed it is definitely reading the track number from the tags assigned in Picard as I changed them, instructed Plex to refresh all metadata for the collection and the track changed. I’m just not sure how to get all 7 instances being found to coalesce into one. album. At least now I don’t have every track playing in my car as sung by AC/DC in a falsetto or by some group called 5th Dimension singing a perfect cover of Aerosmith now haha.
Do I need to bring back another tag and link to all the tracks?
What you did looks correct to me provided you also added Disc Number, which you didn’t list. (In my experience it should be added as a single digit like “1” and not “1/2.”.)
Unfortunately I have seen the problems you describe occur when other albums have incorrect tags or file structure. You can do the right thing with Album A and if Album Q is doing Various Artists wrong, lots of albums will look wrong.
I think the best way to validate your setup is to make a new music library, and put into it only copies of these albums you have worked on. If that looks good you know you are doing the right thing, and you can keep updating your files. When they are all correct, it should work out, but I seem to recall that when I was in your boat I ended up just re-building the library a few times.
If you turn off Sonic Analysis for the time being, massive library changes should be scanned pretty quickly.
Yeah, it’s a PITA. Maybe someone else has better ideas.
1 Like
Thanks, I’ll try setting up an alternate music album with just this one and see what it does. Maybe just start migrating the various albums over to that then…
