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Seems like Plex is hell-bent on replacing ‘Various Artists’ with ‘Various’. Any way to stop it? this is something new…
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I see similar problems - Plex renames my freshly added “Various Artists” to “Blockhead” (another Artist, that has nothing to do with my tagging… This did not happen before the last server update.
My Plex config/agent is also set to “Use embedded tags” so it looks like that plex makes something weird…
Hi, i got the same problem. For me, every various artists albums are automatically renamed in “Barrett Strong”. I don’t know why.
Thanks. Glad to hear that I am not alone. Let’s hope plexies sort this out soon enough 
I looked at this “blockhead” album and i found that it was tagged as “Various Artists//Blockhead” So this double tagged Album has influence on all other Various Artists albums… I don´t know if this info helps troubleshooting
Edit: I added a new Various Artists album after i modified this “Blockhead” Album and no it looks fine again. So Plex does not allow multiple album artist taggings when using Various Artists?
Edit 2: After adding another Various Artists Album it is “Blockhead” again 
Edit 3: Looked at the Artist Info and there is an Entry in “Sort Artist” and it also says “Various Artists”. I changed that also but now I have no new album to test…
I’ve got the same problem now, all my V/A albums (where Album Artist = blank) now have The Muppets as album artist which is very funny but not very satisfying.
It seems that whenever the Plex Music scanner encounters a compilation with an Album Artist set, it will apply that Album Artist to every compilation it encounters afterwards, ie the scanner forgets to flush/clear the variable after processing 1 album and continues to the next.
If that’s it, this should be a quick fix, let’s hope the devs see this post @OttoKerner perhaps you could pass this on?
I have explained that already in other threads: Plex now needs a strict folder structure.
Music > Album Artist > Album Title > Tracks
which means that within any ‘Album Artist’ folder, there must be only albums by one particular album artist.
If you put in only one album by a different album artist + you have ‘Prefer Local Metadata’ activated, then this different album artist can “taint” or overwrite the album artist of all the other albums in there.
In this case, ‘The Muppets’ have tainted the artist ‘Various Artists’.
You need to find that album with The Muppets as ‘Album Artist’ and remove it from the folder ‘Various Artists’. Put it into its own ‘The Muppets’ artist folder.
Then use ‘Fix Match’ on the overwritten ‘Various Artists’ “artist” to rectify the wrong name and bio.
or, you know, plex could just read TAGS properly, like every other media app, ever.
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That’s not it, this The Muppets album is already in a separate folder. It really does appear like the scanner doesn’t flush the Album Artist variable when proceeding to the next folder.
I use MP3Tag to make sure all of the fields are correct before ingest to Plex. Some of the Metadata applied in ripping software or downloaded content is all over the place. The only way to make sure it’s right is to check it yourself.
After doing that, Various Artists import perfectly.
Tags are fully correct, that’s not the problem here.
You can reproduce this yourself easily, just make a (correctly tagged) compilation with album artist, and another compilation without album artist, in separate folders, and run the scanner on them.
Well we might have different versions of what is fully correct.
Various artists always works for me by setting the correct metadata.
I can only say that this is what you rather want to avoid in Plex.
Compilation albums without an Album Artist.
Well, the reason for this is that most compilations should not have an album artist, as hardcoding the string “Various Artists” (in English) in the AA field breaks localization in all other music libraries (and in Plex too, for that matter!)
If only Plex would simply add support for the TCMP/Part Of Compilation flag, all of this would be so easy…
actually plex already does, however it has some internal logic and database design that runs counter to what could be considered ‘normal’ to just about any other music library app.
for example, plex specifically (or at least did during the posts of this thread) removes the track artist if the track artist is the same as the album artist.
if you read this thread, it will tell you exactly what file and section of that scanner is causing that and how to ‘fix’ it (at least until the next time plex is updated).
this just being one example of plex making assumptions about people’s music library and forcing/wanting us to adopt only the ‘plex way’ of media organization.
Correct, but this thread is about another bug (Album Artist from 1 album applied to other albums).
oh yeah I agree.
but to plex eye’s, ‘it’s not a bug’ (because your files are not organized according to plex demands)
I don’t quite believe that Plex really wants to impose some crazy non-standard setup forever - the basic database structure is in place to handle things correctly in principle (the sqlite db design even allows for per-track genre and year! It even has an album-level flag for “compilation”!), it’s just that the new scanner has introduced certain new bugs.
And as Otto mentions, for now using the workarounds (re-arranging folders, populating the Album Artist field with dummy values, even if that’s incorrect) is the temporary solution until these bugs are fixed and the workarounds aren’t needed anymore.
The ‘no track artists for compilations’ bug has just been fixed, I’m sure the devs will get to these other issues in time.
to para-quote a recent favorite quote of mine;
“I think you are wrong, but I hope you are right.”
We’ll see. In the mean time I’ll just run a quick find/replace job in the sqlite db on these Muppets entries
edit: for those that want to know:
- get the app “DB Browser For SQLite”
- close Plex Media Server
- open the database file (make a backup first obv) in the folder /Plug-in Support/Databases/com.plexapp.plugins.library.db
- select Browse Data, table “metadata_items”
- filter to metadata_type 8 (=Artists), filter title/title_sort on “Various Artists/Various Artists”, write down this id. This is the correct “various artists” id you’ll apply to all the wrongly scanned albums. Say this is 12345
- in the same way, find the id of the wrong album artist that Plex applied to all your compilations, say it’s 23456. You’ll notice btw that the “title” and “title_sort” fields are not the same! In my case this was “The Muppets”/“Various Artists”, but it could be anything.
- clear all filters, then filter for metadata_type 9 (=albums) and filter parent_id for 23456 (i.e. the wrong artist id)
- in each line, replace parent_id 23456 with 12345
- file → write changes
- start Plex Media Server
Looking at this, it seems that the source of the bug in the Plex Music scanner is that when it encounters a V/A compilation album (ie, no Album Artist) it looks up and applies the id of the first match returned against a query for “Various Artists” in the “title_sort” field, while it should look up/apply the id of the first match where “title” and “title_sort” fields are “Various Artists”.
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