Best practice for 'Various Artists' compilation albums?

General Discussions
23

I don’t understand what you mean by that.
“Various Artists”, when used without errors, is supposed to appear as one artist in your Plex library. Not as 100 different “Various Artists”.
Inside this one Various Artists are then all albums by, err, Various Artists.

This can be caused by one single track, either without AlbumArtist tag, or with a different AlbumArtist tag than “Various Artists”.

  1. All tracks which are stored inside your folder VARIOUS ARTISTS must only have “Various Artists” as their AlbumArtist tagged.
  2. If there is a track stored outside of VARIOUS ARTISTS which also has its AlbumArtist tagged as “Various Artists”, it must not share its $artist folder with tracks which have a different AlbumArtist.

Keep in mind that Plex cannot read embedded metatags from some file types, like WAV, MKA, or DTS. It will treat these files as if they had no meta tags at all. Which means it is relying solely on folder structure and file names. Which is why I recommend you to always stick to the folder structure laid out in here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200265296-adding-music-media-from-folders/

1 Like
Plex changed Album Artist to the lexicographically sorted last artist for all compilations