I had all of my artist tags set up correctly, and I’ve been using Plex for years (though I’m far from an expert). I went through all of the growing pains of learning how to tag my artists/albums/songs, and I’ve learned how to have everything working smoothly. However, I discovered today that I no longer have a “Various Artist” folder (which contained a LOT of albums), and instead everything that was in that folder is now in my “Sting & The Police” folder, which formerly only had one greatest hits album.
I removed the Sting/Police album, updated my server software to 1.24…0.4921 and refreshed all metadata, but nothing changed. All of these albums have metadata that says they’re “Various Artists.”
I believe this happened after I updated to version 1.23.
I’m using the app for Windows 10.
I would just remove all of these albums and do the “Plex dance,” but many of these albums are included in playlists, and I don’t want to lose that.
Remove this one album for now.
Perform “Fix Match” at the top artist level and change back to “Various Artists”.
Then take a very close look at that Sting & police album.
Where is it stored? Does it share an “artist folder” with other albums which have a different album artist?
i.e. a hierarchy like Music / AlbumArtist / AlbumTitle / Tracks
Do all tracks of this album have an “album artist” meta tag in them? And do all tracks of that album have identical content in that “album artist” metatag?
Thank you for the response, Otto. I think I fixed the problem, by updating my software (I was one update behind), removing the Sting & Police album from my library, and refreshing metadata. That gave me back the “Various Artists” artist. But I noticed that not every album in that folder updated, and I had several instances like the Sting & Police album that were now showing up in Various Artists. For example, I have a compilation of Greg Lake’s material, but it includes tracks from some of his previous bands. I have this in my “Greg Lake” folder, because he is the album artist, but some of the tracks are from ELP or King Crimson, and therefore this shows up in Various Artists when I want it to be in “Greg Lake.” How do I fix this?
First of all: in the properties of your music library, do you have ‘Prefer local metadata’ activated or not?
The way forward is depending on this setting.
Do also verify which album artist is listed for this album at musicbrainz.org
OK if “Prefer local metadata” is turned on, your embedded meta tags better be immaculate and complete. And your folder organization better follows the rules laid out below:
Your example album
I have this in my “Greg Lake” folder, because he is the album artist, but some of the tracks are from ELP or King Crimson
should be fine where it is, as long as every track within this album has an “Album Artist” meta tag which has “Greg Lake” as content. The actual performer of the song should be in the regular “Artist” meta tag.
As for your soundtracks and samplers:
The folder hierarchy of
Music / AlbumArtist / AlbumTitle / Tracks
applies to samplers and soundtracks as well.
Which means that you cannot store albums which differ in their album artist inside the same artist folder. Otherwise you’ll see the exact issue you have now, where the album artist of all albums inside will be overridden by one of the albums.
So, if you have e.g. the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack, you cannot store the album inside of Music / Soundtracks / Rocky Horror Picture Show OST,
because the album artist of that album is usually tagged as “Richard O’Brien”. So it belongs into Music / Richard O'Brien / Rocky Horror Picture Show OST.
Which in turn means that all tracks of all albums which are stored inside of Music / Various Artists / must be tagged with “Various Artists” as their AlbumArtist.
Which in turn means that you better don’t use a folder like Music / Soundtracks / if there is even one album inside this folder which has a different AlbumArtist than the rest of them.
Hmm…very interesting. And thank you again for the quick reply.
I try to be meticulous when creating my data tags, but I imagine that I must have something in my “VA” folder marked as “Soundtrack,” for some reason. I’ll check that and will convert everything to “Various Artists.”
It is odd, however, that I am just seeing this issue. I didn’t realize that my folders were so important. I thought the metadata tags were the “ruling” data for classification.
Your examples are very helpful. I’ll try to clean that up and will report back.
My Eric Clapton music now has “Clapton, Page, Beck” as the artist name in Plex, despite the metadata for every file listing “Eric Clapton” as the album artist. I have “Plex Music” as the agent. No matter what I try, it keeps reverting back to this Clapton, Page, Beck default.
Same as the various artists issue.
One of the albums inside the Eric Clapton folder is (or was) tagged with “Clapton, Page, Beck” as the Album Artist. Or not all tracks had an album artist meta tag to begin with.
When I try “unmatch,” Plex reverts back to “Clapton, Page, Beck” for all Eric Clapton albums. When I manually try to “match” to “Eric Clapton,” it changes them all to “Eric Clapton,” but then when it’s finished processing, it changes them all back to “Clapton, Page, Beck.”
I’ve gone back and made sure that all of my Eric Clapton albums are tagged correctly - artist and album artist all say “Eric Clapton.” Plex won’t have it, though. It keeps defaulting to “Clapton, Page, Beck.”
this is a very annoying problem and often difficult to track down, due to this exact situation (the problem files are outside of the expected location).
the main reason is plex currently only supports single artists (not separate album artists + track artists), so in situations where there are tracks with mixed (intentional or accidentally) artists, it can cause problems.
hopefully some day they will be able to add support for the concept of differing album artist + track artist, but who knows.
in the interim, plex relies heavily on musicbrainz and local file organization.
I am suddenly having this exact same problem, since updating to the latest Plex Server, on a library that worked perfectly up until now. The scheduled metadata refresh ran and renamed my “Various Artists” entry to “FILMS”, which does not actually exist as an artist tag on any of my files – but interestingly enough I did have one file tagged with the artist “FILMS” like a week ago before I fixed it and Plex-danced it, so apparently Plex has held onto that artist name (despite Plex-dancing it away) and decided to resurface it now.
using plex web, search for the incorrect artist name and press enter to get the full search results
above you can see that I apparently have 2 different various artists, the one with 36 is probably a bunch of unmatched or incorrectly matched albums, the one with the custom icon and 2900 albums should be the ‘real’ various artists.
navigate to the ‘film’ or incorrect artist name page (where it shows all albums from that artist), normally you can simply click the artist name to get there quickly.
now i can see what albums are jacked up/mis matched, some of them are probably not matchable, but others should be.
Lets look at ‘boys on the side’, I search for boys on the side and see that I have 2 albums, one of them has 1 track, the other has all the others.
I can merge them, but I prefer to doing fix match on the short one, or both if necessary. Sometimes, you must even unmatch both, then try to re-navigate to the now unmatched version, then rematch it.
now after fix matching the single track, all tracks are properly assigned together
another way, if there is an actual artist that is named incorrectly, is to fix match at the artist level (instead of doing each album individually).
if that fails to fix it, you can manually edit the artist name and artist sort, change it to the correct (or whatever way you want it to display).
sometimes there may already be a correct artist, when you type it may show up in the quick select as you type, you can click on it to re-assign the current artist name to the other one.
