If I have an album whose artist was detected correctly, and one that wasn’t, if I click “match” or “fix incorrect match” then I will end up with 2 of the same artist, but sorted separately.
I’ve found a workaround, and it’s to instead of using the match feature, to “unmatch” the one that didn’t detect properly, and then manually copy/paste in the proper artist name into the “edit” fields. Then they are merged properly.
This isn’t terribly high priority as I’ve got a workaround, but it’s annoying.
There are a couple of typical things that can cause matching problems with music. One is not having your folders and filenames in good order, which helps Plex perform the matching. The other is if Last.FM or Gracenote simply have bad data for the albums in question.
If you are not using embedded ID3 tags, the folder structure and filenames are very important. This guide will help you get it right.
If the problem is because Last.FM or Gracenote simply have bad data, manually fixing the problem may be your only recourse. There’s not much Plex can do about that.
Personally, I found that Last.FM and Gracenote are so full of bad data that I eventually put in the work to get my ID3 tags in shape, and configured Plex to prefer embedded data over the online services. The headaches arising from this have pretty much gone away.
But the strange part that if I use the “fix match” option it will actually be detected correctly. But the albums are still listed separately under different artists.
@nlsun said:
But the strange part that if I use the “fix match” option it will actually be detected correctly. But the albums are still listed separately under different artists.
Hard to say, without knowing how your files are named, folders are organized, the state of your embedded tags, and whether Plex is configured to use them. Gracenote/Last.FM have caused stranger results than that.
I understand it might be implemented where something under the covers prevents them from being merged, but from a UI perspective, if the same artists and associated metadata are pulled in by Plex, I expect it to either treat them as if from the same artist (as that’s how Plex presents and has populated the fields), or to give me an option to “merge duplicate artists” (or something of the like).
