How to fix Plex splitting albums by a single artist amongst multiple identical "artists"?

[LloydGM]

Server Version#: 1.30.2.6563
Player Version#: n/a

Plex is really messing up my Music folder and I can’t figure out how to get Plex to fix it. Much of my music is correctly identified, but there are many, many problems. Here, I will address my most recent issue…

I have 11 Bob Seger albums, all with correct metadata in the ID3v2 tags. Yet Plex insists on splitting up albums into three separate artists, all named Bob Seger, and 2 of which have completely identical details when viewing the artist entries, and the 1st 2 having the same poster, the 3rd having completely different details and poster. Albums are arranged 1 per subfolder under a “Bob Seger” folder. Folder structure is \Music\Bob Seger{YYYY} {ablum title}{track#} {track title}.
My albums are:
1969 Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man
1975 Beautiful Loser
1976 Live Bullet
1976 Night Moves
1978 Stranger In Town
1980 Against The Wind
1981 Nine Tonight (Live)
1982 The Distance
1986 Like A Rock
1991 The Fire Inside
1994 Greatest Hits

The 1st “artist” contains only 1 album: 1994 Greatest Hits
The 2nd “artist” contains only 2 albums: 1969 Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man, 1991 The Fire Inside
The 3rd contains 6 albums.
There are 2 of my 11 albums that Plex couldn’t identify at all.

Even goofier is that Plex couldn’t find my Bob Seger albums at all no matter what I tried in library mgt. Eventually, the only thing that got even 9 of the 11 albums identified was removing the entire Bob Seger folder from my hard drive, doing a Scan, adding the folder back, and doing another Scan. Oddly, I get different results every time I do this add, remove, re-add maneuver. This problem also occurred with several other groups of albums I added to my library, including Plex failing completely to recognize Cream, Eagles, or Yardbirds, though after over a dozen scans, it’s recognizing most of the albums now. But not everything.

But, how do I get Plex to straighten up and fly right with Bob Seger? Seriously, there’s only 1 actual Bob Seger, so why does Plex think there are 3? And I know it’s not because there’s the band Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band because the albums are completely mixed up amongst the 3 artists Plex created.

This screenshot shows the 3 “artists” created.

[beckfield]

You said the ID3 tags are correct, but is Plex configured to prefer embedded tags?

Is the Album Artist tag in each of these files populated? If they are blank, that may be a problem.

Could you screenshot your tagging app showing at least these tags:
Filename, Album Title, Track Title, Album Artist, Track Artist, Disc Number, Track Number

[OttoKerner]

Quick 'n Dirty fix: merge the artists: https://support.plex.tv/articles/201018248-merge-or-split-items/

[LloydGM]

Here’s a screenie of Kid3, shows ID3v2 tags which are always correctly utilized by every other app I’ve ever used as well. Some of those tags usually aren’t relevant to me, like Disc Number (I’ve yet to find that on any of my LPs, lol) or Filename., though I’ve also included the MediaInfo text for Katmandu selected in the screenie.

And yes, the pref local media is checked on both of my music libraries.

General
Complete name                            : S:\Music\Bob Seger\1975 Beautiful Loser\03 Katmandu.mp3
Format                                   : MPEG Audio
File size                                : 8.29 MiB
Duration                                 : 6 min 7 s
Overall bit rate mode                    : Variable
Overall bit rate                         : 189 kb/s
Album                                    : Beautiful Loser
Track name                               : Katmandu
Track name/Position                      : 3
Performer                                : Bob Seger
Genre                                    : Rock
Recorded date                            : 1975
Writing library                          : LAME3.100
MP3GAIN_ALBUM_MINMAX                     : 130,251
REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_GAIN                    : -1.760000 dB
REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_PEAK                    : 0.534813

Audio
Format                                   : MPEG Audio
Format version                           : Version 1
Format profile                           : Layer 3
Format settings                          : Joint stereo / MS Stereo
Duration                                 : 6 min 7 s
Bit rate mode                            : Variable
Bit rate                                 : 189 kb/s
Minimum bit rate                         : 32.0 kb/s
Channel(s)                               : 2 channels
Sampling rate                            : 44.1 kHz
Frame rate                               : 38.281 FPS (1152 SPF)
Compression mode                         : Lossy
Replay gain                              : -1.42 dB
Replay gain peak                         : 0.477959
Stream size                              : 8.29 MiB (100%)
Writing library                          : LAME3.100
Encoding settings                        : -m j -V 2 -q 0 -lowpass 18.5 --vbr-new -b 32
MP3Gain, Min/Max                         : 134,251
 Undo                                    : +004,+004,N

ReportBy                                 : MediaInfoLib - v22.06
CreatedOn                                : UTC 2023-01-26 23:28:00

[LloydGM]

Huh, I’ve used that for other things like mini series or movies split across multiple files. Does that work for Artist as well? Seems kind odd, but…

I’d still like to figure out what’s going wrong, though, because I just added over 100 albums to my library and the music scanner is having all kinds of problems. E.g. it couldn’t identify my Cream albums at all. I had to remove my Cream folder to another hard drive, rescan, then relocate them back and rescan. With my Boston and Yardbirds albums, it ID’d some of the albums but not all, and the relocation trick worked on the 1st try with Yardbirds, but it took 2 tries before it worked with Boston.

I’ve been a software engineer for 40+ years, and when I see this behavior, it’s either a flaky algorithm, unreliable/bogus data, or both. Worst, the issues are inconsistent. I know it ain’t my PC, either…it’s a 4Ghz 12-core PC, 64GB RAM, an Nvidia 3060 card, and I’ve got a 1GB fiber connection (up & down).

[beckfield]

I see “Artist,” which I believe is the artist for the individual track, but there should also be an Album Artist tag. If this tag isn’t populated, it can cause unpredictable results.

[LloydGM]

Oh I get it, track artist vs album artist…make sense.

Funny that Plex would get it right sometimes and not others, though…that inconsistency is what really gets me.

Anyway, I’ll see if I can quick-clone artist to album-artist and see how that works. At the very least, I can do it manually (ugh!) for now.

[beckfield]

Yeah, Plex does weird things when that tag is missing. It didn’t used to, but they made some changes a couple years back that greatly improved metadata gathering, but the trade-off is that embedded tags need to be very accurate.

Make sure the Album Artist tag is identical for every track in any album.

[wyldemusick]

Something that might be helpful is using MusicBrainz Picard for tagging recalcitrant albums. Tag&Rename works too. I used to have a third one that accessed various sources, but that lost access to many of its databases.

[LloydGM]

Thank you, I tested it on a few artists and it’s working. Been populating that tag all afternoon and evening, am half done. Woof!

[LloydGM]

I’ve been using Kid3 which is nice in that it pulls from multiple sites as well, though I rarely use that feature since, when it goes sideways, it really goes sideways, lol. Still, I’m always looking for a better tag editor so look forward to checking those out. Thanks!

[beckfield]

I like MP3Tag for Windows. I’m on Linux, so I use Puddletag, but it’s fairly similar to MP3Tag.

[LloydGM]

Nice try, everyone, but that’s a big no-go. I tried everything short of MY workaround of removing folders and re-adding them. I spent the last few days cleaning all ID3v2 tags, adding add’l artists (over 200 albums in all), and Plex recognized TWO. Wow. Just wow. As you can see in the 2 screenshots, even after multiple uses of “scan library files”, “analyze”, and “refresh metadata”, Plex still failed miserably (see 2 screenshots below), correctly ID’ing the 1st and 44h of 11 albums, all ID3-edited the same way at the same time. Go figure.

I hereby quit, declaring Plex as THE WORST at matching music over any utility I’ve ever used, and that dates back to the early 90s, mind you.

Maybe there are some ultra secret steps I can perform to get Plex to actually perform the obvious, but you know what? If it takes dozens of hours to figure out a workaround that actually works, I think we can safely declare this product’s feature as Completely Impotent and Horribly Broken. (And that’s a lot kinder than I’d grant any person on my development team at work for such a wonderful feature that’s worked fine in other products for over 20 years.)

[LloydGM]

Ah, see? Move the artist’s entire folder to another drive, Plex removes the artist, relocate the folder BACK to Plex’s library root folder, and it ID’d the 1st 6 albums, no more. I repeated those steps AGAIN, and it ID’d all 18 albums.

Why is that?

[wyldemusick]

I’m wondering about Plex’s wonky media scanning myself. I just saw several audiobooks show up…which were added a long time ago…and I thought they’d been caught in a scan. Nope!

[LloydGM]

Yeah, my favorite is all these “albums” with only 1 song in them. It turns out Plex is taking a movie soundtrack and splitting up the individual tracks and calling each 1 an “album”. So I suddenly have a dozen “albums” for my Guardians of the Galaxy Soundtrack, grrrr.

And don’t even get me going about singles. I think the Plex guys have never heard of singles before. For some reason, they think that every song MUST be part of an album. I’m guessing they’ve never heard of 1-hit wonders, either? [sigh]

[wyldemusick]

I occasionally have to go in and use the usual tools to retag singles (I gave a bunch of vinyl rips, digital singles, and CD single rips) to stop Plex’s shenanigans in that regard. I went through conniptions trying to get a tag on a couple of OMD singles — and MusicBrainz wasn’t a great help, even though the singles are in their database.

Some of this is Plex being weird, even with embedded tags (for a while it decided Andrew Lloyd-Webber was the artist on everything) and some is issues with databases. I use GD3 to tag when ripping via EAC, and that can get pretty wonky at times.