Library view completely messed up when folder contains songs from multiple artists

General Discussions
1

Hi all,

I am trying to setup my Plex libraries and I am struggling with adding a folder that contains songs from multiple artists. Let me describe from beginning.

I have collection of RIPped CDs to flac files with correctly filled ID3-Tags: artist, album artist, title, year, album art and so on. I have configured Plex to use local metadata as described here.

My first HDD directory contains full ripped albums:

root-library-dir
|- Artist - Album
  |- song1.flac
  |- song2.flac
|- Artist - Album
  |- song1.flac

This works perfectly fine. I can view songs by artist, album, folder, etc in this library.

I have second folder which are my favorite songs grouped into subfolders. These are exactly the same files as above but organized in a different way:

root-library-dir
|- mega-mix-1
  |- song1.flac
  |- song2.flac
|- mega-mix-2
  |- song1.flac
  |- song2.flac
|- mega-mix-3
  |- song1.flac
  |- song2.flac

And Plex goes crazy in this library. Album arts, titles and artists are completely mixed and I am unable to view by album, artis or folders.

Please see screenshots.

Any solution for this?

2

New folder structure is required now:
Music > Albumartist > Albumtitle > Tracks

For “sampler”-style albums this means
Music > Various Artists > Mega Mix 3 > Tracks

If your files have embedded meta tags, make sure that each track has the same content in its ‘Albumartist’ tag. Usually “Various Artists”.

3

Thanks for a brief reply. Unfortunately this does not help much. It changes displayed album artist to “Various Artists” and that’s it.

I can view by folders (and I can see my mega-mix-x subfolders) but displayed album art, album title and artist are wrong.

When I switch view to Artist it shows one entry saying “Various Artists” which is fine. But when I enter it (or directly into Albums view), it shows three albums with wrong metadata again. I believe that my 3 subfolders are treated as albums, which is not correct.

Screenshots.
In the first one I play Lana Del Rey - Art Deco. Title and Artist is ok while displayed cover comes from Sting and album title from t.A.T.u.

Second screnshot shows album view where my 3 subfolders are treated as albums with incorrect metadata.

4

There is only one album cover support per album.
All files in a folder are one album.
All files in this folder need to have identical values in their ‘Album Artist’ and ‘Album Title’ metatags.

Can you show me a screenshot with the embedded metadata of all files of one album?

Did you point your test library really to the folder Music and not just to Music/Various Artists ?

mp3tag_multidisc_album
mp3tag_multidisc_album1717×741 53.6 KB

5

Test lib points to Music dir. Files do not have the same album metatag - they come from multiple albums. I treat this folder as a playlist/favourites.

5
51034×483 93 KB

My problem origin: I have Denon Heos Link HS2 which I stream music with to my Hi-Fi and Headphones. It is able to read files from USB pendrive, so it can act as DLNA server as well. And it handles my folders structure fine. But… when I add all files form a given folder to play queue, Denon reorders them by song title. So it does not play all songs from Artist A and then all songs from artist B and so on. So my idea is to get a NAS which could do this. I am looking for same behavior as with PC: move a dir to a Foobar, click play and listen.

6

You can’t do that in Plex. It’ll never work, unless you also unify the album title tag.

7

I see. What would you suggest to create playlists in Plex then?

8

Playlists in Plex can be created in two ways:

  • Assigning single tracks, albums or whole artists to a playlist manually
  • create a filter and turn it into a ‘smart’ (auto-updating) playlist

see [HowTo] Create Playlists (Updated for new UI)

9

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