How to get all artists & songs from a compilation album to show up together?

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Hi everyone. First post so please forgive any fo pas…
I have this album: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/p/mob-hits-music-from-and-a-tribute-to-great-mob-movies/409557/2675309342045?st=PLA&sid=BNB_DRS_Marketplace+Shopping+Media_00000000&2sid=Google_&sourceId=PLGoP2725&k_clickid=3x2725

In my music library, I get an “artist” called “various artists”. In here, this album shows up, but with only 1 song. The rest of the songs are under the individual artists. How do I, say, group them all together?

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This sounds like something that can commonly happen when the metadata is incorrect. If your library is set up to use Last.FM or Gracenote, it’s important to follow the file and folder naming conventions specified in the Media Preparation guide. This will help Plex get a proper match from the online service.

If that doesn’t resolve the problem, it may be that the online services has bad metadata for the album. The only resolution then is to configure your music library to use metadata embedded in your media files, and then make sure your embedded metadata is correct. The downside there is that you’ll have to do that for all the music in your library, which can be a huge job.

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@gmorris001 said:
In my music library, I get an “artist” called “various artists”. In here, this album shows up, but with only 1 song. The rest of the songs are under the individual artists. How do I, say, group them all together?

Various Artists (or ‘sampler’) albums need to have Various Artists in their embedded metadata as the AlbumArtist.
This is a different tag than the ‘Artist’ !

Proper folder structure and file naming helps Plex to keep the files together

Music /
   Various Artists /
      Various Artists - The Best Tracks of the 30s /
         Disc 1 /
            1. trackartist - tracktitle.mp3
            2. trackartist - tracktitle.mp3
            ...
         Disc 2 /
            1. trackartist - tracktitle.mp3
            2. trackartist - tracktitle.mp3
            ...
4

And also…

If you want to ‘Force’ an album with Various Artists into an Artist or Album category and want to maintain those various artist’s appearance on the Album here’s how:

Rock and Roll Doctor was recorded after Lowell’s demise and while it does contain artists from Little Feat their grouping can’t really be called Little Feat - unless I say so… and I do. Generally I detest Various Artists 'cause I spent 3 days getting rid of the thousand I had before I started using MP3Tag.

MP3Tag: http://www.mp3tag.de/

1 Like
5

Thank you for all the responses. I’m pretty sure I understand all this.

I’m going to proceed by re-organizing all my files per the recommended folder structure.

One question remains, in the Mob Hits album, some of the songs do not have the track artist identified. What should I use? Anonymous? John Doe?

6

@gmorris001 said:
One question remains, in the Mob Hits album, some of the songs do not have the track artist identified. What should I use? Anonymous? John Doe?

This totally up to you. You could investigate from which movie the song comes and then look up the composer on the IMDb.
Or you just go with ‘Various Artists’.

7

You can also leave it blank - like I did for ‘Honest Man’ above. Been meaning to fill that in… and you can fill it in later too.

8

This nightmare has been plaguing me for a number of years. I thought there might have been an update to resolve this, still we are unable to see artist’s tracks from various artists within the actual artist. I don’t know coding, or what kind of level of skill would be needed to resolve this. But would be very nice if it was fixed.

2 Likes
9

I’m literally about to digitize “Rock n Roll Doctor” and wouldn’t you know it, you’ve used this as your example, complete with MP3Tag screen shot! YOU Sir are a rock star in your own right! Thank you.