I am having a very strange errror. I have two artists in my library:
Bernard Lavilliers (Bernard Lavilliers - Wikipedia) who is well known,
and Bernard Villiers who is much less well known. The second Bernard has an EP album with just two songs on it. I am using local metadata, and I have checked that all of the tags are correct for both people.
For some reason, Plex keeps on turning Bernard Villiers into Bernard Lavilliers - even though the tags are different, it’s in a different subdirectory, etc.
Does anyone have any clues on what might be going on here?
However the fix suggested didn’t work for me. I removed both artists, did the ‘plex dance’, then re-added the less famous artist. In this case, it classified him with the correct name (Villiers). However then when I added the famous artist back, it now classified him as Villiers instead of Lavilliers. I also saw this in the log:
“We have a matching item 59729 for the item we just set a GUID on (59733) ‘Bernard Lavilliers’ (index: 1)”
So it seems Plex is deciding these are the same artist and merging them. Is there a way I can prevent this?
First of all, verify that your files don’t contain the wrong artist name in the Album Artist meta tag. (That’s a different tag than the regular ARTIST.)
No ALBUMARTIST tag at all is also not good. Add one to each track. All tracks in one particular album must have the same content in ALBUMARTIST.
You can use software like this Mp3tag - the universal Tag Editor (ID3v2, MP4, OGG, FLAC, ...) to do it.
If you don’t have the check box “Prefer local meta tags” ticked in the properties of the Plex music library, you can try “Split” on the Artist in Plex.
Followed by either Fix Match or Unmatch on the now wrong spelled artist.
I like to add that one of the main reasons for the mingling is that the Artist Bernard Villiers doesn’t exist on Musicbrainz.orgSearch results - MusicBrainz
Contributing is also that the prefix “La” is an article and therefore tends to get removed by string-matching algorithms.
If someone would create a record for this artist on MB, chances of this happening again would be reduced significantly.
Another way would be to enble “Prefer local meta tags”. However, this requires strict adherence to the rules laid out above, or you may end up with an even bigger mess in your library.
Thanks for the response. I do have my library set to prefer local meta tags, and I do have it set up as described. I have to do this because I have a number of albums that aren’t in MusicBrainz and probably won’t be in the future (random ethnic music, old LPs etc).
I can try adding AlbumArtist - for most of my library this hasn’t been necessary but will see if it makes a difference here.
On this one: “Contributing is also that the prefix “La” is an article and therefore tends to get removed by string-matching algorithms.” - I think that might be the trick - but do you know why fuzzy matching is happening on artist name, and especially when can’t you force it to not fuzzy match?
[Edit] I added AlbumArtist and did the Plex dance. It didn’t make a difference, Plex still thinks these are the same artist.
Thanks @OttoKerner, splitting the artist worked. Unfortunately the images and backgrounds from the more popular artist are still connected to the old one and I don’t know how to remove those, but otherwise it works. If you know how to remove the album art / artist images etc that would be appreciated - thanks!
