Artist fields with ampersands - "Someone & Someone Else" - confuse artist categories!

[scztt]

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When I have albums in my collection with BOTH a single artist (e.g. “Taylor Deupree”) and with multi-artist releases where an ampersand is used (e.g. “Taylor Deupree & Kenneth Kirschner”), I often find that the ampersand version of the artist name will take over ALL releases for the first artist (e.g. all “Taylor Deupree” releases are listed as “Taylor Deupree & Kenneth Kirschner”). Once this happens, there is no way to undo it. IF I rename the artist field of a specific album (e.g. “A&B” → “A”), the album disappears but then Plex immediately puts the artist field back to the original form. IF I rename the entire artist category, I now see “A” instead of “A&B”, but of course all of my “A&B” albums are now incorrect - this just reverses the problem.

Other observations:

1. This doesn’t occur with ALL artist fields containing an ampersand - it MAY be related to the order things are added, e.g. if the “Someone & Someone Else” is added first, then it takes over all subsequent “Someone” releases.
2. I haven’t yet seen this occur where artist names are separated by “and” rather than “&” - but it’s possible that this is just a coincidence, I notice that “&” is more common in my library.
3. “Fix Match” and “Refresh Metadata” don’t seem to fix this.
4. I have not tried the “Plex Dance”, but in any case this isn’t a viable solution - I have MANY artists that are affected, and anyway if it’s order dependent, then specifically re-adding each album in a specific order or workaround the bug would obviously be a nightmare…
5. It LOOKS like “Split Apart” will fix this, but this ends up being a total disaster. If I have a “buggy” artist of the form “A&B” that contains albums by “A”, “A&B” and “A&C”, then splitting leaves me with THREE duplicate “A&B” artists, each containing the respective albums. At this point, I can probably manually rename each of these artists to what they should by, but this doesn’t happen automatically.

This is a bit of a nightmare, as I’ve slowly discovered that any artists in my library that collaborate tend to be munged into some unexpected bin based on, like, a single collaboration EP they released in 2001

[certuna]

Yes, and this is very annoying. This comes from the limitation that while MusicBrainz supports multiple album artists (“Alice” & “Bob” are two separate people in MBZ), Plex supports only one album artist per album, so it assumes that “Alice” and “Alice & Bob” (that both get matched to “Alice” on MBZ) are the same album artist, and can be applied to all albums.

Best workaround is to tag either one Album Artist (“Alice”) or both as multi-valued tags (“Alice” and “Bob”), but put the conjoined multiple “Alice & Bob” as Track Artist for each track. Result is then that all albums are categorized under the first Album Artist “Alice”, but the tracks still show up in search when you look for “Bob”, and you see the correct “Alice & Bob” during playback and in tracklists.

Not very elegant (and it sucks to have to re-tag your whole library just to work around a limitation in Plex), but it works.