Server Version#: Version 1.24.5.5173 (Synology)
Player Version#: Version 4.69.1 (Plex Web)
I’m noticing a variety of problems when artist names have special characters like “&” or “-”.
For example, “Siouxsie & The Banshees” – for this band I get a different album for each song of a given album in some cases, and multiple albums by this artist won’t match. I have a similar problem with “A-Ha” for example. Lots of other examples like “Sad Lovers & Giants”…
And today I noticed that all my “Emmylou Harris” albums are now being overriden with artist name “Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell” even though I’ve set everything to prefer my own tags, I suspect the “&” is causing this problem since I have many albums by “Emmylou Harris” but only one album by “Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell”. Frustrating.
The obvious workaround is to find all the albums with “&” and change to “and” but this feels like it should not be necessary.
I’ve only got a few artists with either of those characters, but Plex doesn’t seem to have any trouble with them.
I would double-check the tags, and have a look at this How-To to make sure they are in good shape. When Plex re-wrote the music scanner a couple years ago, it really helped me find errors in my tags. Nearly all the unpredictable results I saw were caused by tag errors.
Feel free to post screenshots of the tags, if you want a second set of eyes on them.
This might be caused by you storing albums by both distinct artists into the same “artist folder”.
If you want “Emmylou Harris” and “Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell” to appear as separate artists in Plex, you need to store them like this:
Additionally, all tracks in all albums which are stored inside the Emmylou Harris folder must have an “AlbumArtist” meta tag which contains “Emmylou Harris” and nothing else.
Same goes for all tracks inside the Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell folder. Their AlbumArtist meta tags must all contain “Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell”.
I did verify that everything was correct in terms of folder names and meta-data across all my folders / libraries. I’ve been through this with the whole missing cover art problem so I’m pretty careful there – recently the Plex bugs related to missing cover art (GUID problem) were finally found and gladly that’s working well! So my issues with meta-data are now down to these special character cases.
To verify this problem I created a new Library with just two albums. The library loads one folder named “Emmylou Harris” the other folder named “Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell”, each folder is confirmed to have the appropriate album and meta-data on each track has been confirmed as well.
When I create the library, it initially shows them as distinct artists for a few seconds as I see Plex creating the new library and adding the albums, but then suddenly the spinner goes on each album and “Emmylou Harris” gets reset to “Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell” as the artist name. The resulting library now shows two artists both with the name “Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell” and the two albums which now are set to the same artist “Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell”.
I recently reproduced the error with “Siouxsie & The Banshees”, “Sad Lovers & Giants” and “A-Ha”, but those cases were a little more random, this example today was just two albums and very clear that there is an issue.
Any suggestions?
Please let me know if there are any additional screenshots or information you might want to see to help me solve this.
OK that fixed it with simple test case! The problem was “Artist” was populated but not “AlbumArtist”
Tonight I will see if this is the case across the library for the other cases. My library has seemed fine with “Album” set but not “AlbumArtist” but maybe this user error manifests itself particularly when special characters are involved…
This test is not valid, because:
if you add the “artist” folder directly to a library, the scanner won’t see the “artist” folder level. Instead, it starts with the “album” folder level. i.e. a totally unsupported situation, where the outcome is undefined.
Sorry I just didn’t explain it well, I thought it was obvious I would not do that. I created a directory called “Test Emmylou” and put the two folders holding one album each in those folders. I then loaded the library at the level of “Test Emmylou”
The results worked perfect once I ensured that “ArtistAlbum” was populated, in the first test only “Artist” was populated. For some reason Plex does ok with this user error in most cases but, for me, that user error created problems with artists with names including special characters.
I’m in the process or setting “AlbumArtist” on every album in my other libraries and re-loading every library. I’m about 1/3 the way done (I have many libraries), and the results are looking really good so far.
