My “Various Artists” section is so overloaded that it’s hard to browse. But “Various Artists” is a magic word to Plex. It treats that Album Artist differently. It doesn’t try to look up a match for that artist. It knows it’s for compilations.
Can anyone thing of a way to set up another “Various Artists” under a different name?
For example, I have a lot of dance music compilations, and it would be great if I could stuff it all into a “Various Artists (Dance Music)” Album Artist.
This could be done through a new Library of course, but then you miss out on music features that look at all the music in a library, like Sonic Analysis.
Various Artists is the default Album Artist for when there is no album artist.
I have created several more compilation album artists:
Compilation - Movie Soundtrack
Compilation - Game Soundtrack
Compilation - Audiophile Reference
Compilation - Club
…
and I put them in the Album Artist field for those albums, and have set the Music Library to prefer local tags. I manage my tags in mediamonkey. Plex is not a good tool for managing music libaries - it serves the library you have set up.
Not a perfect solution, but works for me.
Obviously it searches for a match and doesn’t find one. But you can add your own poster picture if you like.
That’s what I currently do, but it’s not awesome. For example, Plex treats them as real artists, and does Sonic Analysis, which relates the compilation fake artist to other real artists. It’s… Untidy.
This may be the best we can do for now but like you said, it’s not perfect.
Yeah. It pretty-much sucks. I am trying out a different way at the moment.
My media store stays the way it is with separate folders for each kind of compilation and the Album Artist tag stays as “Compilation - Type” so that I can keep the organisation straight in my library manager (Mediamonkey).
BUT in Plex, for each of the special Album Artists, I edit the PLEX entry for the Album Artist and call it “Various Artists”.
This throws them all in “Various Artists” in Plex and they are recognised as compilations by Plex. At least my media folders are manageable, but time will tell if I can stand the fact that Plex sees so many compilations on one screen.
We’ll see how it goes.
Itunes got this right 20-odd years ago with the “compilation” flag. Honestly I wish the Plex developers had applied the same amount of thought.
That seems like a reasonable compromise, given the limitations.
Supporting the existing Compilation flag does seem like the right move. That way we could have any number of compilation groups under whatever Album Artist names we wanted.
