Can someone explain to me how Plex determines that an album is a Compilation?
I have a multi-disc Bach boxset. artist and albumartist tags are consistent on all disc in the set yet Plex has decided that some of the discs are albums and others are part of a compilation. The resulting display is therefore disorganized. I would like Plex to display my collection in a consistent and orderly fashion but I can’t see any setting or tag that I can edit. How do I change the compilations to be albums (or vice versa I don’t really care).
If you want to treat it as a compilation the albumartist tag should be ‘various artists’ on all tracks. The artist tag can be whatever the artist name is for that track.
If you want to make it show up on an artist page - let’s say Glenn Gould - you tag the albumartist as Glenn Gould on all tracks, and the artist tag can still be whatever other artist you want.
The albumartist tag on all tracks (5512 of them… it’s a big set) is set to ‘Johann Sebastian Bach’. The artist tag is set the same. I prefer to classify these big boxsets under the composer rather than mix them all as Various Artists (I have a number of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart boxsets). Plex put 80% of the 222 discs in the ‘Compilation’ section within the Artist ‘Johann Sebastian Bach’ and 20% of the discs under the ‘Albums’ section of the same artist. Any thoughts on how it managed to do this? I am of course fine with them being within the JSB artist but am still unclear why it has not treated them all the same since they are all tagged the same and how I can fix it.
Ok, that’s helpful… I don’t like what it says but it’s helpful.
Basically my understanding is that you either switch the feature off or you have to go and wrestle with the moderators in MusicBrainz in the hope that they will accept your suggested amendment.
If they do, how does that flow back into the Plex user’s library? Does it just happen automatically or do you have to do a metadata refresh?
Looking at MusicBrainz data on this collection: there are already 21 entries regarding how to categorize this boxset; one is expressed at the level of the total boxset (222 discs) and is classed as ‘official’ so I’m guessing that represents the current database view; 10 are expressed at individual volume level covering between 9 and 31 discs (they are consistent with the ‘official’ view expressed at boxset level); 10 are expressed at the level of individual tracks (?!?.) The official view is ‘album + compilation’ and there is nothing here that would explain why Plex has categorized a number of the discs as albums but not compilation in my library. And there’s no point in my raising a change request in MB as it appears to me as though the official categorization there is already consistent.
I think Plex designers are crazy handing over control of this kind of classification to a service like MusicBrainz without giving the user any override capability. Net result is that in my case I either live with the messy he-said-she-said outcome in a number of my classical artists - or possibly with the fact that Plex doesn’t accurately reflect what MB says… that appears to be the case with this boxset - or I have to disable the feature across the board. Or have I misunderstood?
Having looked a little further there isn’t much consistency in the MB classification. For example:
In 2018 DG / Decca release the Bach 333 Complete Edition (the one that started this discussion). It has 222 discs and is a compilation of numerous recordings over the years by many artists. MB classifies the whole thing as ‘album + compilation’.
In 2019 DG / Decca release the Beethoven BTHVN 2020 Complete Edition. It has 118 discs and is a compilation of numerous recordings over the years by many artists. MB classifies the whole thing as ‘other’ not ‘album + compilation’.
It’s fine to use MB as a primary source but there needs to be an override where MB falls down or Plex interprets MB data incorrectly.
If you are using MB. You can edit the tags locally. Then perform another save of the release to update the tags. After that run scan all files on Plex.
