How to resolve / force improper naming?

I’ve just noticed that -all- of my Ella Fitzgerald albums are being relabeled as Count Basie.

I’ve checked and confirmed all the metadata is correct.

I’ve moved the Ella Fitzgerald folder out of my Music directory and I’m adding albums back one at a time.

The first one I added back - “Speak Love - Ella Fitzgerald & Joe Pass” - seems to have been recognized properly.

The second one - “Best Of The Songbooks - The Collection” - is being changed to Count Basie. Even if I go to manually change the artist tag or use Fix Match, it’s “Count Basie”.

What are the options to force Plex to recognize the metadata?

Server Version#: 1.41.4.9463

This is pretty much always caused by albums which are either

  • missing an AlbumArtist tag
  • have more than one name as AlbumArtist [Plex cannot deal with collaborations]
  • are stored within the same Artist folder (i.e. stored on disk) than an album with a deviating AlbumArtist

The only cure is to remove both the misattributed albums and those attributed to the other AlbumArtist and perform the Plex Dance.
So, in your case, “dance” both Ella and Count – after ensuring that all the points above are avoided.

Gotcha. You’re suggesting there’s a Count Basie album with Ella Fitzgerald metadata? This was my thought as well and I’m in the process of moving CB out of my directory and reviewing the metadata.

To be clear - will the Clean Bundles process have any impact on my existing metadata and the custom artwork I’ve uploaded for my media?

I came across this album “One O’Clock Jump” which I suspect is the issue? Although AlbumArtist is consistent across the albums, is it the case that Artist could impact the metadata?

I’ve always been specific about AlbumArtist = the category the album should fall under and Artist = the performer of the song. So, AlbumArtist could be either “Count Basie” or “Ella Fitzgerald” or “Count Basie & Ella Fitzgerald” as long as all the tracks on the album have the same metadata but the Artist value may be different for each track. And I do my best to create new folders for albums where AlbumArtist = “Count Basie & Ella Fitzgerald” though this seems to be less critical in practice.

No. It only removes metadata of deleted items. Kind of “database hygiene”.

Regularly not, if the AlbumArtist has been like that from the first addition of the album into Plex.

Do you have “Prefer local metadata” active in the properties of the music library?
Although it is a two-sided sword, you need it if you want Plex to prefer your embedded metatags. (The downside of it is, that all your albums must meet the 3 points I sketched out above.)