Yeah I am in a somewhat similar situation to you. MOST of my tags are done as you describe, one of the first things I do is make sure all of them have album artist tag for the full album, and that there are no empty or wrong album, artist, track # or track name fields.
Currently scanning everything has worked. Still preferring local metadata but I moved away the soundtrack folder with actual John Williams stuff, then changed all the wrong JohN Williamses directly in Plex. Then reintroduced the soundtracks.
I also have some unorthodox files and tags. I am the only user of my Plex and I have stuff like recordings, my own music, my friends music etc.
Currently everything works fine, although some albums are showing multiple times with only a track or a couple tracks inside even though the albums are perfectly id’d. Which is a small thing compared to the issue I just had
Glad things are improving for you. If you keep chipping away at it, it will continue to get better.
I really hope Plex continues to make improvements in this area. They have recently, like per-track genres, so I think there is reason to be optimistic.
Yeah this is my problem too. I have exactly one album by Trevor Yuile with good tags, but all the Various Artists, even those with good tags (including Album Artist) keeps getting put under Trevor Yuile. It’s freaking annoying and they really need to fix that for a software that I did pay for.
I’ve been having this problem for ages with all sorts of different artists (who are not in my collection btw) being assigned to my 400+ various artists albums. Currently it’s “the Lab Rats.”
I’m using iTunes / Music to manage folders, so it’s totally consistent & a known quantity. I have also forced embed all metadata to ID3. Gonna look into the local metadata setting.
Here you can see the tracks are right, albums are not:
I used to use iTunes to organize music. It’s various artists and compilation folder structures are not consistent with Plex requirements if I recall correctly.
Make sure the folder structure and file names match the Plex standard. If it doesn’t follow these rules bad things are going to happen. Plex is extremely fussy about this. It’s just how it is.
The concept of iTunes on how to define a Various Artists album or a Compilation album is fundamentally different.
Usage of iTunes could be one of the main reasons why the above issue occurs in Plex.
