I have over 700 compilations and only six of them show in Plexamp under compilations. I’ve searched and don’t see any clear instructions/directions on how to get this to work. I have all my compilations in a folder named “Various Artists” and then each album in its own separate folder, all albums are tagged with “Various Artists” as the Album Artist. I have all of the albums tagged as “iTunes Compilations” using Musicbee. I tried putting a few of my compilations in a “Compilations” folder but none show up in Plexamp Compilations. All of my compilations show up in Plex under Artists>Various Artists. Does anyone have some method/trick/setting to get this to work?
p.s. all my compilations albums are listed on MusicBrainz.
Like I wrote:
I have all my compilations in a folder named “Various Artists” and then each album in its own separate folder, all albums are tagged with “Various Artists” as the Album Artist.
I mainly use MusicBee to tag but I went ahead and re-tagged about 50 compilation albums in MP3tag (even though MP3tag read the Album Artist as Various Artists) and rescanned my music library in Plex. Still only getting 6 “Compilations” in Plexamp.
I believe that Plex will only recognize compilations, singles, etc where the album has those “tags” set at the MusicBrainz website for your particular release. As you know, this is where Plex gathers most of its data for our music libraries.
I’ve disabled the feature, because of this inconsistent behaviour. When I had it enabled, my various artist folder/albums only showed about 20 albums as compilations, out of 130 albums. Most of the albums were actually manually tagged with the field that MusicBrainz Picard applies ("Release Type" in Picard, or “MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMTYPE” in MP3Tag).
If I was more ambitious, I would add or edit the Album Type for the albums at MusicBrainz. Disabling the feature seemed the easier route.
After you disabled Musicbrainz did all of your Compilations appear in Plexamp in the Compilations section? And if they did how do I go about disabling it?
I disabled the feature to show the various types of albums (Compilations, official, singles, live, etc) I don’t think there’s a way to disable the MusicBrainz data with the Plex Music Scanner. If you use one of the other agents, I doubt you will have any compilations listed.
The only guaranteed solution, is to edit or add the album at MusicBrainz and tag it as a compilation. Wait a week or two for your edits to be approved and then picked up by Plex on a refresh metadata.
I don’t think the Plex Music scanner reads and/or uses that tag from the embedded metadata and relies completely on data from MusicBrainz. Any album tagged as a compilation at MusicBrainz will appear in your library as a compilation.
Call me lazy but, I don’t want to edit/add over 750 albums on Musicbrainz just to get something as seemingly simple as having “Various Artists” show as compilations in Plexamp. I find Musicbrainz to be the most unintuitive website/service I have ever encountered. I wanted to see how the albums that do appear in compilations are tagged there and I couldn’t even find them there. I am not the only person with this problem and so it seems to me it would be nice to just have Plex/Plexamp honor the compilation tag or treat Various Artists in the Album Artist like every other music software I have ever tried does and treat it as a compilation.
Update: I managed to find one of the Compilation albums that shows under Compilations in PlexAmp on Musicbrainz and there isn’t anything in the “Tags” at all:
