When going into advanced settings on a music library, there is an option to “prefer local metadata”
I have (as it happens) a few “compilation” albums (“Best Cinema Music” etc) that are really multi artists
I was seeing “odd” behaviour when scanning the albums in and doing a - namely instead of being recognised as “VArious Artists” and putting all tracks underneath a single album, I would get one track per artists when viewing “By Album” by “Title”
I created a new library, copied exactly the same folders onto another part of the disk, pointed the “media to add” to the new folder and scanned them in. This time, into the new library, I just see each album with its tracks
The only difference between the old and new library is that the new library ignores local data.
You this flag have that effect
(I tried deleting and rescanning from the old library but they got rescanned in exactly th same way - each track on the album appearing in its own right
If you configure the library to prefer local/embedded metadata, Plex will go with what information it finds in your files. With regards to compilation albums, you’ll need to make sure the album has the same title and album artist for Plex to recognize it as 1 album – not a dozen 1-track albums per individual artist.
In addition to Tom’s notes, the Album Artist should not be blank. If it is a various artist album, the Album Artist on every track should literally be “Various Artists.”
Please see my other long reply with screenshots to Tom
What I seem to have is not the specific words “Various Artists”. I do however have a fixed structure (I think) for all tracks but sometimes PMS decides to split them into deifferent 1-track albums, and sometimes bring them in under 1 album with “x” tracks. Hence why I was trying to understand how to fill the right metadata field with the right information so as I dont have to manually edit all my tracks
