How best to get compilations to show as one album?

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

I’m a Plex noob, so I read many relevant threads and essentially tried the advice from another thread to set the “Album Artist” field for each track to the Compilation name.

Then I set the Artist and Album tags to the actual artist and album for each track.

But to my surprise (unlike for a regular album) in Albums view each track appears separately. (Ditto Tracks view.)

However, in Artists view all the tracks of the compilation do appear in a single album. (Ditto Folders view except no album cover images.)
So that’s good, except I still can’t find a way to get the tracks within the compilation to appear in tracknumber order.

Anything I could do better please?

Server Version#: 1.14.1.5488

2

How are the files named?
Which meta tags are contained in them.
What is the file format?

3

Thank you very much for your reply, Otto!

I’ve got “Use embedded tags” enabled.

“Local Media Assets” is at the top of the Agents lists.

The tracks are named and tagged like this:

08 - Cherry Oh Baby (Rolling Stones, Black and Blue).flac

(I know that the parenthetical Artist, Album in the file name isn’t proper, but I was guessing that would be OK. No?)

4

Well, if every track in that album has the same Album Artist and the same Album title tagged, they all should “hold together” as one album.
Try the Plex Dance with the whole album.

5

Thank you very much for your reply Otto, but wait, only the Album Artist tag is the same on each track. I should have shown you more than just one track to answer you, sorry!

02 - Love Shack (B-52’s, Cosmic Thing).flac
03 - Let It Bleed (Rolling Stones, Let It Bleed).flac
04 - Higher Ground (Stevie Wonder, Innervisions).flac

(That’s what I meant when I said in my original post, “I set the Artist and Album tags to the actual artist and album for each track”.)

I did that because I got the impression from that other thread that the Album Artist tag alone would be enough (for the compilation to “‘hold together’ as one album”)…but am I hearing from you that I also need the Album tag to contain (not the separate Albums from which each track come) but the compilation name (already in the Album Artist tag)?

If so:

  1. I guess I’ll use the Comment tag instead to hold the separate Album names from which each track are sourced.

  2. Then I guess the Plex Dance might not be needed right now, but out of curiosity, does the Plex Dance do something that a fresh Add to an empty Library doesn’t?

6

That is OK.

Setting a different album title for each track is a no-no.
Then you don’t have one album anymore.

Precisely.

No, if you create a fresh library, the Plex Dance won’t do anything differently. The Plex Dance is for the cases where you don’t want to create a new library.

7

Thank you VERY much for the priceless into, Otto! I’m overjoyed that this user community is so vibrant.

8

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