Manual Album Artist Changes Unmatches Music

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
,
1

Background:
I’ve manually added album artists for a large number of albums in order to have them appear in certain “artists” when browsing by artist. Examples being Soundtracks, Video Games, Kids Music, Broadway, Disney, etc, etc. I know it’s an odd way to organize, but the family enjoys being able to go to a particular artist to hit all soundtracks for example.

The Issue:
I am no longer able to update the Album Artist for an album without the entire album unmatching and losing other metadata.

The unmatched album shows with the correct album artist, but it loses all the other metadata besides track titles. If I match the album again, the album artist will revert to the original album artist.

Previously I was able to update the album artist for an album and it would retain the rest of the metadata. Every now and then it would lose the metadata, but after doing a refresh on that album everything would update appropriately. In other words, it worked pretty seamlessly.

It seems like something changed in the past few weeks that makes it so a manually made change isn’t sticking over metadata from the agent.

Is this newly expected behavior? Is there a way around this for my use case?

The Environment:
Windows 10
Server Version: 1.23.4.4712

Reproduction Steps:

  1. Find an artist (Artist A) and open up an album for that artist (ensure the album has good metadata)
  2. Select all of the songs for that album
  3. Open the bulk edit
  4. Update the album artist to Album Artist 1
  5. Upon saving changes the UI will exit the album page and go back to Artist A
  6. Navigate to Album Artist 1 in the Artists List
  7. You will see the the album art and all other metadata disappears. Really just artist/title remains.
  8. If you attempt to Match again, it will revert back the manually entered Album Artist to Artist A

This is likely related to a previous issue I filed, but is more specific with a (hopefully) reproducible issue.

If logs would help, I can upload them.

Thanks for any assistance! This is… a bit frustrating. I use Plex for music pretty heavily and the whole family lives on Plexamp.

2

I have the same issue, seeing a bunch of custom “Album Artists” based on titles of albums for various artists collection all getting grouped into on big various artist mess. I was under the impression that if you set these up as unmatched in the first place (based on the album artist being unmatched, not the individual albums featured in the Album Artist) that you could save these and not have them get grouped. I’ve lost hours of custom work now.

3

Ditto, lost a ton of work curating the library to how I want. It seems Album Artist is not one of the fields that can be locked either, so it’s just a completely busted management experience now. I guess the only way to move forward short of a fix would be to set up the library to prefer local metadata and manage everything outside of Plex… which just sucks.

4

All music in Plex should be stored in a folder structure

/Music
   /Album Artist
      /Album Title
         01 - title.mp3
         02 - title.mp3
         03 - title.mp3

Even in the light of this release note Plex Media Server - #439 by drzoidberg33

(Music) If a single directory appears to have multiple albums, match them all.

I’d still keep the albums by different album artists separated into different “artist folders”.
Particularly if you enable Prefer local metadata.

5

Is that actually going to make a difference for various artists albums that we don’t want to get lumped together so we separate them with different “Album Artist” tags?

I thought the metadata is what was used, not folder naming conventions.

6

If the Album Artist of an album is called Various Artists, then it goes into the artist folder “Various Artists”.
If the Album Artist is different, then it must have its own, separate artist folder.
i.e. don’t store albums by different album artists within the same “artist” folder.

7

I don’t store anything in any artist folders. My folders are
/B
/Black Sabbath (1970) - Black Sabbath
/Blind Faith (1969) - Blind Faith

/D
/Dylan, Bob (1963) - Bob Dylan
/Dylan, Bob (1963) - Freestyling Bob Dylan

That kind of thing. and it works, and none of those appear to be a problem.

I have absolutely no album artists set as “Various Artist” a soundtrack would look like this:

Casino (1995) - OST the album artist would be “CASINO”. so that it would appear in my library under “C” as “CASINO”.

Or for compilations of a record label, I would use the label name like this one for Atlantic Records as the album artist, and this one wasn’t affected in this latest logjam of unwanted matching:

image
image1103×232 71 KB

and inside:

image
image1082×462 111 KB

See how pretty that is compared to “VARIOUS ARTIST”?

To prevent this from happening in the future, would using TAGS work? In the music libraries under the Edit and advanced settings. there doesn’t seem to any options for how tags display. If I’m forced to “Various artist” everything, breaking them up by tags may work? HAs anyone tried it?

What’s frustrating with this is that prior to the update, my curated library was gorgeous, and everything “locked” based on what plex shows, yet here I am. If it’s not possible to do what I’m trying to do, the dumb software shouldn’t let us do it in the first place. The lack of flexibility on how people curate their libraries is a real knock on the product. I don’t know a single person with this hobby that tags their music the same way, yet plex expects a stringent standard?

8

So in my setup I do have things organized like that. Everything that I want as a particular album artist is in an appropriately named album artist folder. So my structure is like you’ve got above. In fact, I’ve even modified the ID3 tags before it got to that folder to have the album artist I want as the Album Artist meta field (the Artist field is the original artist of course).

With that said, when the scanner runs through it doesn’t really pay attention to the “album artist folder name”. It will match the album and use whatever album artist was in the match.

If I correct the album artist field in the Plex UI it will save and show correctly in the artist library view… but the album will have completely unmatched and lose other metadata (album art, release year, description, etc, etc). This used to work just fine and I did the work to get that all set up in the Plex UI.

I do have Prefer local metadata turned off right now as I hoped to do most of my management in Plex itself rather than in separate editors.

9

Correct. The trouble begins, when you have e.g. two albums inside the same artists folder, which have differing album artists.

10

I have Prefer Local Metadata turned on and had the issue.

11

So my structure is like this:

Music
- Musicals
    - [1964] Fiddler on the Roof (1964 Original Cast Recording)
    - [1986] The Phantom of the Opera (The Original London Cast)
- Rock
    - Black Sabbath
        - [1970] Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath
    - Blackfield
        - [2005] Blackfield - Blackfield
        - [2007] Blackfield - Blackfield II

In this example the Musicals folder all contain a bunch of albums that then have the Album Artist ID3 tag of Musicals. I have similar folders for other “custom album artists” I want to show up, organized and labeled the same way.

The individual artist folders under my genre folders all have the appropriate artist/album artist for that artist.

I don’t have cases where I have multiple albums in the same folder that have differing album artists ID3 tags.

This structure previously worked, and in odd cases where it didn’t work I could manually override the Album Artist Plex field and retain all other Plex metadata. With the latest updates is there a structure that would work better?

12

So your saying that PLEX is matching to the album artist folder name on the ahrd drive, and not the ALBUM ARTIST metadata?

There’s no signs of that in my experience since I’ve gotten incorrect artist matches based on my spelling mistakes in the ALBUM ARTIST metadata.

13

No, I am not saying that.
Please read up.

14

Why would this be trouble if the album artist metadata is correct?

15

No issues with that, I’d say. Because all albums inside the folder “Musicals” have an identical album artist.

But I am not sure how the genre folders play into that. They appear to be on the same folder level as your “Musicals” folder.
Depending on the number of genres you have, I’d consider “hiding” the genre folders from Plex, by adding the genre folders individually to the music library.
Of course if you do that, the musicals folder needs to be put into a genre folder of its own.

However this is a major restructuring, so it might lead to further trouble with mismatches and loss of manual metadata edits.

16

It simply is in Plex.

17

Yes I suppose that is an odd part of the structure. The genre folders are at the same level as my custom album artists. So you’re saying a structure like this:

Classical
  - Artist 1
      - Album
Custom Album Artists
  - Broadway
      - Album
  - Disney
      - Album
  - Soundtracks
      - Album
  - Video Games
      - Album
Hip Hop
  - Artist 2
      - Album
Jazz
  - Artist 3
      - Album
Rock
  - Artist 4
      - Album

And then instead of adding the root folder to Plex, add the “genre” folders. At that point Plex is only indexing at the Artist/Album Artist level.

Would you say I need Prefer Local Metadata on? Or do you think Plex will be able to match and handle it better with the organization cleaned up?

Honestly, I already lost a ton of my manual metadata updates with this server update. :grimacing: So most of it is long gone. I can easily test this out in a new library and leave the broken library alone in case I need to go back to it.

It is still concerning to me that I can’t manually change certain metadata in the Plex UI without the album entirely unmatching. That used to work. :confused:

18

Yes.

Personally, I have it activated. Because if you create your own album artists for your soundtrack and sampler albums, you want Plex to use these instead of the official album artists which are filed on Musicbrainz.org for this album.

The same applies if you have an artists which is close to your heart and you happen to have several versions of the same album in your library. (e.g. “original” and “remastered deluxe” version etc.). With Prefer Local Metadata off, Plex tends to throw them into the same album.

19

Ah yes, I have had that happen to me before. I’ll give it a go with this structure and Prefer Local Metadata turned on. Thanks! :crossed_fingers:

Frustrating that this change blew away a lot of custom work I did in the Plex UI for music (especially without notice this would happen), but hopefully some small library changes smooths things over.

20

I have it on and have found that without some extra metadata effort it still wants to lump them together if you’re not careful. I do extra “ALBUM” name work to keep them split and it seems to currently work. Looks good too. Here’s an extreme example of breaking up a boxset since we can’t do disc labels (have “disc 1” labeled “Original Album”).

image
image980×510 108 KB

I have the metadata “ALBUM” labelled like this:

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The “Sort Album” field shows my original meta data, reflecting disc 7 as the demos. Once matched and whatnot I edited the “Album” text to get rid of the “07” since I like the cleaner look.

As far as I know this should be stable, but I’ve not been having good luck with plex this week so I’m not sure. I’m halfway of slowly redoing my music based on previous information so this lumping is a real wrench in the works.

Do we know how tags can help with mathcing that is forcing music into the combined lump? In theory the locked tag should keep it showing in the library under the group we want it to or are those locks likely to get wiped too?