How does plex decide what is an album?

General Discussions
1

I have an awful lot of music on a hard disk. Lots of directories, but the lowest level directory in every case is a single album or a single disk from a multi disk album. The files all have the track name as the file name, and a lot of the extra data is completed against them, album, etc.

So why, when Plex Server scans the drive does it for a lot of them insist in creating an album for each track?

The only solution I have found is to select all the tracks that belong to one album (where it has correctly displayed the art and the album name) then set the artist to Various Artists. Plex then has a quick think, and creates a single album with all these tracks under it.

Thanks

Tom

2

If you aren’t using embedded metadata, this usually comes down to filenaming. You might want to look through this guide to make sure your albums/tracks are named properly.

Personally, I’ve found that the most dependable way to get Plex to “do the right thing” by all my music is to make sure the embedded ID3 tags in my media files are complete and correct, then configure Plex to use embedded metadata. It takes a lot of work up front, but, once done, my headaches in this area were gone.