@trumpy81 said:
You are dealing with Various Artist albums, so no, there is no information regarding the Artist, there’s nowhere to view that information for a Various Artist album in any case.
That’s not true. In the ID3 spec, there is ‘Band/Orchestra/Accompaniment’ (TPE2) and ‘Lead artist(s)/Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)/Performing group’ (TPE1). (There are also TPE3 and TPE4, but they don’t apply here).
The fact is, the ID3 specification does not define a tag for ‘Album Artist.’ The TPE2 tag has been misappropriated for use as an ‘Album Artist’ tag. Unfortunately, most applications for editing and/or reading/playing media have conformed to this misappropriation, so the TPE2 tag has become a de facto ‘Album Artist’ tag.
iTunes resolved this by creating their own, proprietary ‘Album Artist’ tag. The ID3 spec allows for user-defined tags, and this may be how they did it.
Under those conditions, the way most people manage Various Artist albums is to set the Album Artist tag on every track to ‘Various Artists,’ and the ‘Artist’ (TPE1) tag to the specific artist for each track. In Plex, this appears like this:
Note that the individual track artist does appear next to the track title.
No Artist Details page will be created for individual artists on a Various Artists album. If you have albums for an artist who also appears on a Various Artists album, the Various Artist tracks will not appear on the Artist Details page (there is a feature request to change that). However, with the recent improvements in Plex’s Search feature, this is at least now searchable:
