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I am very confused. I have edited Various Artists as Album Artist for every compilation I have, but now it seems like all of them are scanned as John Williams by Plex.
Everytime I see John Williams, I check the ID3 tags and it says Various Artists every time. I have “Prefer local metadata” checked. Am I losing my mind perhaps? 
I have seen this problem as well. I believe it can happen even if your VA stuff is all tagged correctly and even if your John Williams stuff is all tagged correctly. Other albums being tagged incorrectly can cause this weird symptom… I think.
Make sure you are following the music organization rules and then use a utility like mp3tag to make sure EVERYTHING is named and tagged correctly.
That’s the only way to make Plex’s music library behave – give it exactly what it wants.
I have been meticulously doing so and the issue appeared only recently.
If one (?) bad tag can ruin my whole database, what’s the use. Trying to spot one mistake in a large database is pretty much impossible.
Not sure how a tag from a different album could mess up hundreds of separate albums thought? That sounds like there is a massive issue with Plex but this is the first time I have had any major issues with it…
Because you have activated “Prefer local metadata”.
Plex is only doing what it has been told.
Most important:
Verify that all your albums have a proper “Album Artist” meta tag. (That is a different tag than the regular “Artist” tag.)
All tracks on a particular album must have the same “Album Artist”.
All albums which have the same “Album Artist” can be stored together like this:
/Music <-- library root folder
/Various Artists <-- AlbumArtist folder
/Sampler 1 Title <-- album folder
01 - Artist - Track.mp3
02 - Artist - Track.mp3
03 - Artist - Track.mp3
...
/Sampler 2 Title <-- album folder
01 - Artist - Track.mp3
02 - Artist - Track.mp3
03 - Artist - Track.mp3
...
The opposite (storing albums with differing AlbumArtist tags [or no Album Artist]) inside the same artist folder must be avoided!
This is the crucial rule which, if not followed, can result in the mess that you are curently dealing with.
I have set up Album Artist as Various Artist for all of my compilations, or do you mean something else than ID3 tag by meta tag? I tried editing album type tags (compilation, soundtrack etc) in Musicbrainz and it just won’t recognize my folder structure and rather will suggest making changes like “this song from this album belongs to a compilation x and should be tagged so”. I can’t make a head or tail of the software, it looks like I would need to teach it my whole collection album by album to get it right.
So I use mp3tag instead. All my compilations are in a separate compilation folder, and all of them are tagged as Various Artists as Album Artist, and I make sure that all in the folder are so. So I do follow that structure.
I tried checking off prefer local metadata and scanning again to see what happens, although this will likely make a mess of other things
That’s what I use as well.
No, don’t do that.
Compilations are just like regular albums. The only difference is the name of their AlbumArtist, which is “Various Artists”.
Organize them as shown above.
First verify to which folder your music library has been pointed. That will serve as the root folder of your music.
In there, you have subfolders for each AlbumArtist.
Each AlbumArtist folder will in turn contain a subfolder for each album.
This is an example for a typical compilation album.
You can see the meta tags as well as the folder structure and file names:
After extensive attempts to get a good match and various failures it is sometimes helpful to perform the Plex Dance “light” (i.e. without step 4).
I mean what I stated is the same as how you explain it.
… \ Music \ – Various Artists
… \ Music \ Artist A
… \ Music \ Artist B
etc
And absolutely every Various Artists album has the Album Artist tag set as Various Artists. I check this every time I put new albums in that folder.
I just have a “–” in front to show it before the actual artist name folders. I also have similar “-- soundtracks” and “-- split releases” folders
Looks like Plex has completely made a mess of my collection and will not obey my tags 
In a situation like OPs, where we may be fiddling with the library a lot, I don’t bother with the Plex Dance… I delete the whole library and re-add it, turning off every option that has to do with sonic analysis, tour dates and that kind of thing so it goes quickly. Of course this is only reasonable if there aren’t playlists and history to be preserved. But I have found this way to be a bit faster.
I would definitely not use dashes or anything like that in the directory names. Give Plex exactly what it is asking for. Plex is fussy when it comes to music. If you break the rules bad things can happen.
It does not make sense for me to have Various Artists, Soundtracks etc mixed in between different artists, so I will try putting those without dashes in a different folder level.
Music\Various Artists
Music\Music (for artist folders)
etc
So this is not about tags. It is about Plex being a mess, and overriding my tags due to some sort of a glitch. It is worrying that these sorts of bugs exist and from the sounds of it this has been around for a while. So feels unlikely to be fixed.
If I have to constantly run around trying to find alternative fixes to get around Plex’s mindgames idk how long it will be worth it.
Seems like the only way to change these tags is to manually change the artist (in Plex itself) from John Williams to Various Artists for every album that is Various Artists and not John Williams. That’ll be fun. And no guarantee that it will stick.
It not making sense to you is not a bug. That’s just a different way to organize things.
How is it not a bug?
I have clearly set my folder structure and ID tags. It has been fine for a couple of years until suddenly all Various Artists change themselves to John Williams.
If that is working as intended, it must be an April Fools joke.
Plex will let you get away with some off-standard stuff, until it doesn’t.
I’m not sticking up for Plex or scolding you when I say this: the only way to make Plex work for music is to follow its rules exactly. If that isn’t acceptable, Plex is not the music server for you. It’s just how it is. 
FWIW I have a large music library and I had exactly the problem you are reporting until I fixed every single last darn file and folder to meet Plex’s rules. Since then, every single file I have added has also been compliant. And I have had no problems since.
Seems like the only way to change these tags is to manually change the artist (in Plex itself)
I have never changed one single bit of metadata in Plex itself. I only manipulate folder structure, filenames, and tags.
Yeah I agree, and it makes sense to require exact rule following.
However in this case neither I or anyone else knows what rule I have broken. I dont think I have broken any. If someone claims I have made a mistake here, they should at least tell me what mistake!
I removed the dashes and that did not change anything. And it does not make sense for that to cause Various Artists to change to John Williams. Maybe it could cause some issues, but if that would be the effect, it would definitely be a bug. And it would be easily fixable. Currently there is a “leak” in the system, some kind of leak, and it exists because the ways of it’s behaviour are not well enough known.
I did an abridged version of a plex dance I guess - quarantined my soundtracks folder with any actual “John Williams” material, changed the real compilation album tags directly in Plex to match what the id3 tags say aka “Various Artists” as album artist.
Then introduced the soundtracks back.
I can see some albums are already changing to non-tag info, single tracks off some albums appear as separate albums with the same name. Again tags are completely uniform within the albums. Only things that change are track name, track number, disc number if applicable.
At least this is more bearable for now than the john williams apocalypse-
I thought I did that already above.
The source was either a missing AlbumArtist meta tag (if prefer local meta tags was OFF)
or a rogue AlbumArtist metatag which was located within the wrong Albumartist folder. (if prefer local meta tags was ON)
Nope, all various artists Album Artist and AlbumArtist tags were set as Various Artists. I dunno how many times I have to reiterate that. Only Various Artist tagged albums in the Various Artist folder and Various Artist tagged albums only in the Various Artist folder. Now, tell me again, what mistake did I make? You made assumptions, that is not the same as pointing out my mistake.
Can you tell me the logic by which the Album Artist tag would be overriden as John Williams? If you can make it sound like a feature, maybe it is not a bug. Otherwise, such random behaviour appears to be unintended, and a bug.
Just another plug that Plex,inc could have fixed this issue coming up to a decade ago, but lacks the knowledge and expertise to even attempt such a groundbreaking attempt.
Perhaps Keith can allocate milestone payments recently received towards actually fixing multiple artists, this can absolutely go towards the social network Keith is forced to create from the last funding round - how can I even think about sharing information about any of the cool new tracks I have been listening to if Plex,inc can’t even get the artist correct?
I disagree about music being an afterthought, Plexamp is my favourite music player and very well done as a player + the sonic analysis is a nice thing to explore.
However it feels like library scanning / metadata handling has some serious issues, and you only need to look around to see people having major, feature breaking, problems. The existence if “the plex dance” is itself a sign of issues with database handling. The issue with tracks with multiple artists is a baffling one, a sign of something broken and my issue #2 at the moment
No one is saying that is logical. It’s a problem with Plex but IME it is triggered by some lack of compliance in your data.
When I had this problem, the thing that seemed to cause the scrambled artist names was bad album artist info in some entirely unrelated track. In terms of your library a problem may remain in a place that is neither Various Artists nor John Williams.
Are you sure that all of your files are correct? If not, start there.
Yeah I getcha. It’s a different poster here who has this idea that Plex is bugless and therefore I must’ve ■■■■■■ up.
I am sure that in the 50K songs I have there could be something wrong. And I am sure that I will never achieve full perfection. I would also challenge the notion that anyone with a large enough library has everything in absolute perfect order.
I am still unsure, how would a different tag altogether change those tags? Like if the tags had embedded code that could mess up Plex code? Reading plain text from ID files and then that plain text somehow causing everything to go haywire seems like a stretch. However if Plex database is as messy and held together by bubblegum as it seems, who knows.
It’s better now though. Just unnecessary hoops in the way of getting here, and not sure if it will stay like this.
It beats me. When I had incorrect tags still there certainly wasn’t anything weird in them like SQL commands. But from what I saw I am reasonably confident that a problem tagging Artist A can manifest with Artist B and in particular how Artist B may get mixed up with Various Artists.
This is what I would do…
My tags are not perfect but they are imperfect in ways that are not dangerous. For example, I am still working on my per-track genre tags. My DJ mixes are all in a fake Album Artist called DJ Mixes. Plex has no idea what to do with a 90 minute set recording from 1993 so these files are all ugly, but they have not contaminated the rest of the database. Other non-modern-music things that Plex cannot handle gracefully like classical music, ringtones and sound effects are in separate libraries.
I have a big library and everything is working great. This is doable. It is just tedious.
And, Plex could certainly make some improvements.
