Somehow every album in my music library that’s either a compilation, or has multiple artists on it, has had the Album Artist field changed to “Roger Waters”
To the best of my knowledge, there’s no way to do a ‘select all’ from a search result and bulk edit (or I’d be using it fix this), so I’ve no idea how this has happened.
Anyways, how to fix it? There are hundreds of albums affected, and I need to update the Album Artist for every album that’s currently set as “Roger Waters” to “Various Artists”
Is this possible? I’ve seen other posts on here relating to database maintenance and corruption, but without knowing the schema this could be tricky. I’d appreciate it if someone on the dev team who knows the db schema could just tell me.
Actually, it looks like I have two Artist entries for “Roger Waters”, one who is actually Roger Waters, and another that is assigned to all the compilation albums. Looks whatever internal value is used for the “Various Artists” Album Artist name has gotten confused.
Even if you could, that would not be the way to fix this. There is some problem with your file naming/metadata – that is the root cause of this problem. If you fixed the data in Plex, it would blow up again if you ever needed to rebuild the library. Spend the time fixing the files, not Plex’s interpretation of the files.
Reassess your library. Follow the official file organization rules to the letter, especially the Album Artist tags, and make sure you use Various Artists where appropriate.
Plex is extremely fussy about music but if you follow all the rules, even a large library can be trouble-free.
If you do not have play history/playlists you need to preserve I would also delete the library and recreate it while you work the problem, instead of trying to do the Plex Dance.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. However, you’re incorrect. My folder organisation, file naming and metadata are all perfect, and have been for years. This was a sudden change to my Plex library that saw all albums with an Album Artist of “Various Artists” start incorrectly displaying as “Roger Waters”. Individual track Artist fields within those albums continued to display correctly.
I got a clue as to what was wrong when I looked artists listed alphabetically, and noticed two entries listed as “Roger Waters”. One had all the Roger Waters albums in in it, the second had all the Various Artists albums.
I’m guessing that the Plex database stores a numeric value for the Album Artist in its database, and has a look-up table of values to Artist names. The look-up table must somehow have had the entry for Various Artists changed to Roger Waters somehow.
In the same Artists view, I editted the entry and changed it back to Various Artists and all is good.
