My ‘Various Artists’ albums are a complete mess! Some are OK and are identified as ‘Various Artists’ while others are split across tracks (so each track of a compilation becomes a 1 song album!).
Then in other cases, ‘regular’ non-compilation albums are instead identified as compilations/Various Artists!?
Is there a straightforward, hopefully easy way to fix this?
A lot of the info I’ve found searching forum seems outdated which is why I ask.
Thanks in advance!
Chumbo
Sounds like you might have configured your library to prefer embedded metadata from your files. If so, make sure every track that belongs to an album has the exact same album artist and album title.
Yes I did. And I tried what you suggested to no avail. Now I’m not exactly sure what I’m supposed to do once I’ve made changes to the metadata, e.g. adding ‘Various Artists’ to the ‘Album Artist’ tag in the file (which I never use BTW. Never really understood what was meant by ‘Album Artist’ as opposed to just ‘Artist’? I just use the ‘Artist’ field).
I tried refreshing the Metadata (under the 3 dots on the album cover) but that didn’t change anything.
Under the pencil icon on the album cover, on the ‘General’ tab, I renamed the ‘Artist’ field but once I hit ‘Save Changes’, it reverts back to the original name!
And in some odd cases where the album isn’t even a compilation but it gets labeled as a ‘Various Artists’ under ‘Artist’, I don’t even understand where it gets that tag??
I look at the tags and ‘Various Artists’ is nowhere to be found!?
This is a mess… 
This How-To is pretty comprehensive and should help.
[HowTo] Configure Plex to use embedded metadata (music)
If you have embedded tags in your music files using an app like MP3Tag or EasyTag, you should not bother trying to edit the tags within Plex. Changes you make in Plex are not written back to the embedded tags in your files. They are only stored in Plex’s database. You could end up with conflicting tags, and I don’t know how Plex reacts to that.
As to the difference between “Album Artist” and “Artist”:
Artist is basically the artist for the track. Album Artist is the artist for the overall album. If every track is by the same artist, then obviously Artist and Album Artist would be the same. If the tracks are not all by the same artist, then, generally, the Album Artist should be “Various Artists,” and “Artist” would be the artist for the individual track.
Album Artist is also helpful if there are tracks with guest performers. It will keep the album organized as it should be while allowing the individual track to list multiple artists.
You can manually merge those albums back together, but the worst-case scenario might be to Plex Dance the songs. If you have the metadata in your files accurate, Plex ought to accept every song in the folder as part of the same album.
I use my own metadata, which is kinda funny because my metadata is pretty hosed. I’ve been slowly working on adding the metadata back in (Thank you, MP3Tag and MusicBrainz!), and keep finding albums that are all broken up like what you got.
BTW, after you change some file metadata, try telling the library to scan. Even simple file renames seem to cause Plex to think that they are new files, so the dance sometimes isn’t necessary.
Thanks everyone! This looks promising as the explanations make sense.
So I’ve used Mp3Tag to add the ‘Various Artist’ to the ‘Album Artist’ tag and…now what?
I was about to run a ‘Refresh All Metadata’ on my Music library but the prompt that popped-up made me hesitate.
It said:
Forces a download of fresh media information from the internet. This can take a long time. Any locked fields are not modified.
Is this what I should be doing?
Notice the folder structure:
Don’t forget to populate the Track# meta tag in all tracks.
In some cases you need to perform a Plex Dance after changing embedded meta tags.
(with music, you can omit step 4 though)
Ok, it looks like I might need to do this Plex Dance everyone is talking about since the simple rescaning of the library didn’t solve it.
So do I understand it correctly that I have to physically remove ALL my music files from my NAS where they are stored as explained in step 1!?
- move all files for the media item out of the directory your Library is looking at, so Plex will not “see” it anymore
Wouldn’t it be enough to fool Plex into thinking the folder is now empty by renaming my Music Library to anything else, then create an empty folder with the original name of my Music Library?
That would affect your whole music library, not just one album.
Well, as I said, my whole music library is kind of a mess.
I guess I’ll take it step by step, maybe go alphabetically.
Thanks!
If you want to “Plex Dance” the entire library, you could just delete the library itself in Plex, and re-create it.
Renaming the folder that Plex is pointing to (or removing the pointer Plex is looking at in the “Add Folder” dialog) would work just as well as re-creating the library.
I had assumed you had just one or two albums that were broken, not the entire library’s worth of metadata.
Yeah, thanks…it’s complicated. Maybe I’m not explaining my situation too well but it doesn’t matter. I’ve gotten a lot of help already so I’ll now try out a few things and see how it goes.
A big thanks to all that chimed in, really helpful! 
Yep that was at least one of the problems.
After making a massive music library files update… If you do not have playlists etc to save… I find it much easier to simply delete the library and re-make it. That’s the nuclear Plex Dance.
You can turn off some of the time-consuming metadata lookup stuff, and Sonic Analysis, until you are sure that the basics are working.
If you followed the rules for folders and filenames, and if all Various Artists albums have “Various Artists” in the Album Artist tag, you should be in good shape.
If there are still problems you should look at your OTHER files. I cannot prove it but I think that if you have other artists messed up, like inconsistent Album Artist tags… I think the fallout may be visible in the Various Artists area. I have seen some weird stuff.
The bottom line is you have to do it all to Plex’s standards or it may freak out. But once you have it right it should be very reliable. I had exactly your problems in the beginning, but haven’t seen any music library weirdness in a couple of years now.
Well, after many hours of renaming, retagging, rescanning, moving files, Plex Dancing, etc… I thought I finally had it all under control and fixed.
I finally rescanned my library of ±100 Various Artist collection and it got reduced to…4!? What the…!?!
The way Plex handles music files is pretty disastrous. I don’t know what else to do now 
Without knowing what you expect, it’s difficult to advise.
How many VA albums do you think there should be? Pick an album that Plex has apparently misidentified, and take some screenshots:
your file manager showing the folder structure leading to the album, and the filenames in the folder, like so:
MP3Tag showing (at least) these tags for the album:
Album Title
Album Artist
Track Title
(track) Artist
Track Number
Disc Number
As I stated previously, I have ±100 Various Artists/Compilation albums and now I’m left with 4!?
I can say with strong confidence that the problem is not with the files themselves but how Plex is not reading them correctly. Anyway, just to remove any doubts, here’s the screenshot…
I posted only the Mp3Tag screenshot since it also shows the path to the files (‘MERODENAS’ is the name of my Qnap NAS):
The strange thing is that ± 60 of these compilation albums now have as Album Artist ‘Cornbread Red’ instead of ‘Various Artists’ as in the tag!? (Cornbread Red is an obscure artist that normally appears once on one file of my entire music library!??). Really weird 
I just mocked up that album using tracks from an album in my collection. I named and tagged them just like yours:
My library points at “Popular.” I presume your points at “MyMusic.”
Plex handled it perfectly, and was able to get the cover art from MusicBrainz:
So something else is going on. Did this album get assigned to Cornbread Red?
The only things I can see in your setup that vary from Plex’s recommendations are:
The Bobby Byrd Tribute 1996, without the parentheses or the prepended stuff, and see how Plex handles it.The Bobby Byrd Tribute 1996. This could be causing Plex to incorrectly match the album to MusicBrainz.The thing is, before and during I started this thread, I had ±80% of my files being identified correctly and the ones that weren’t identified correctly, I could almost always pinpoint a problem in my tags.
So with the helpful information I got from the other users in this thread, I started making all the corrections to the tags, did the Plex Dance, etc…
And now, instead of having it 80% correct, I’m down to ±5%!!
Also, you are focusing very specifically on this one album…but I have another 60 that are messed in the same way with this weird ‘Cornbread Red’ issue I explained previously!
That should be the giant red flag that something is seriously wrong and it’s not my tagging that’s the issue of course. The Bobby Bird and some 60+ others were perfectly fine until a few hours ago.
To your questions…
Part of troubleshooting a problem is to focus on something small, and see if you can figure out something that might be causing a problem, which might be causing all the problems. That’s why I picked one. This is how I would go about it if I were experiencing the same issues.
