You can do this. The artist name Time-Life will then be just another artist as every else is.
Whenever you want to define something that doesn’t conform to the information filed in musicbrainz.org, you need to tell Plex to prefer the informations in your embedded meta tags.
Edit the music library, go to the Advanced tab, tick the checkbox “Prefer local metatags”.
Those meta tags need to be in top shape of course, or you will end up with a giant mess.
Particularly important are the “Album Artist” meta tags.
Fill them with “Time-Life”.
Then put the artist of the track into the regular “Artist” meta tag.
Do also move every album which uses this album artist to sit under the same Artist folder.
There must be no other albums in it, which use a deviating album artist
So:
/Music <-- Plex library watches this folder
/Time-Life
/Flower Power
/Disc 1
01 - track artist - track title
02 - track artist - track title
03 - track artist - track title
...
/Disc 2
01 - track artist - track title
02 - track artist - track title
03 - track artist - track title
...
/Various Artists
/Album Title
/Disc 1
01 - track artist - track title
02 - track artist - track title
03 - track artist - track title
...
/Disc 2
01 - track artist - track title
02 - track artist - track title
03 - track artist - track title
...
Always put a number into the “Disc #” meta tag, even for albums which have only 1 disc.
Do not use the notation 03/15 or 3 of 15. There is a separate meta tag for the total number of tracks on a disc.
The absolute minimum of meta tags you need for the above to work are:
- track title
- track artist
- track number
- disc number
- album title (must NOT contain the disc number)
- album artist
The latter two must be identical for all tracks of a particular album.
Plex does not store release dates for tracks. Only for albums.
So there is not point in tagging each track on an album with a different date.
You can use arbitrary subfolder levels. However, the same restriction applies to them: only albums with identical album artist should be stored in the same folder.
After you have imported the albums successfully, you might want to edit the “artist” Time-Life and set the “Album sorting” selector to “By name”.
There is one restriction: compilation albums which have been given a different album artist than “Various Artists” won’t appear as compilation in Plexamp’s “Compilations” category.
