I have a few instances in which an album with its album artist set to “Various Artists” and its compilation flag set to true/checked is not in the same grouping as other albums which are seemingly set the exact same way.
I’m trying to resolve this and arrive at one consolidated group of Various Artists. I’ve tried removing the album’s folder, doing the Plex dance, and then moving it back. Didn’t help.
There’s obviously some tag information that Plex is keying off of besides the album artist and compilation fields that’s acting as a differentiator and causing this separation. Any idea what it might be?
Thanks.
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I verified that “Album Artists” is identical and read through the “Prefer local metadata” things to know. Nothing jumped out at me.
So I tried the merge. That resulted in something pretty bizarre. Now if I do a “Various Artists” search I get this.:
Yes, that trashcan icon is just sitting there now. If I click on either, I get the same listing of 52 albums. Something’s really janked up in the database.
Maybe it’s still doing something. I guess I’ll just give it more time as it shouldn’t be concluding in this state.
The trash icon means Plex has decided to eliminate some stuff, which can happen when you merge or replace files. You can even see the trash icon on something you know you have, because you just updated it with a new version. Do Empty Trash on the library and then see what it looks like.
Thanks. I had emptied the trash to no immediate effect. However, it’s been hours now and the trashcan-ed Various Artists group is finally gone.
What I was left with, unfortunately, were still some un-merged Various Artists groupings. So I attempted to merge them and now the trashcan is back. I’m guessing that’s part of the merge, to move everything into one of the groupings and delete the resulting empty groupings. Probably just takes awhile.
Not sure where this 2nd merge attempt will leave things. We’ll see.
There’s probably not an easy way to look under the hood and see what the database actually looks like. I’m guessing as far as my Various Artists albums are concerned, it’s a complete cluster-f.
I and many others have had this same problem so at least you are not alone.
In my experience, the way to fix it is this:
Make sure your files are organized according to Plex’s rules (e.g. /MyMusicLibrary/Various Artists/Some Album Name/01. some track.mp3)
Make sure that for each of your Various Artists albums, the Album Artist tag is set to “Various Artists” and nothing else.
Make sure that each VA albums’ tags are using the same text for the album title, and the tracks have good numbers.
Rescan, or better yet, remove the library and re-add it – I would not mess with Sonic Analysis until this is sorted out because you may need to re-scan a few times, and the best way to get a clean scan is to do a “Plex Dance” and actually remove and re-add the files.
If you still have problems after verifying all the VA stuff is correct, then it gets weirder. I cannot prove it, but I suspect that problems with a music library that are outside the VA hierarchy can manifest as the problem you are seeing. So, the next step is to check everything else and make sure those files are following the rules too. You might even want to make a new library JUST for your VA files… Get them working, and then add the other stuff one chunk at a time. See if one addition blows it up.
I had terrible problems at first but once I made sure every file followed the rules, my problems went away. I have added many tracks since then with no trouble because I have tagging/renaming presets set up in mp3tag to make adding files pretty easy and error free. It was a lot of work though, no doubt.
(Getting a tidy library can be done by only manipulating the folder structure and file metadata. Even if you find a way to fix it with manual operations like a merge, fixing the source files is better because if you ever need to rebuild the library, you don’t need to fix it all again.)
Thanks for the detailed reply. I’m sure that’ll help other people as well down the road when they search and find this thread.
Yeah, I’ve always been fairly meticulous about file organization and tagging, even before I had Plex. Lucky for me I had already been doing things according to Plex’s rules.
Which leaves me attempting the brute force procedures like re-scans, splitting libraries, etc.
The way I find music and play it, I guess I don’t really depend on all the Various Artists albums showing up together. So is it worth the effort for me… But just knowing things are screwed up in the db, even if can get along this way, is agitating. And who knows if things’ll just get worse if I don’t do something about it.
I empathize, believe me. I can’t even identify exactly what I did that fixed my problem because I was changing more than one thing at a time. I hope it works out for you.
…however, let’s just take five minutes and have a quick look around." Four hours and two Excedrin later, I think we’re in good shape.
I did find problems with some of my files. There were a handful of Various Artists songs hiding outside of the VA subdirectory as well as other anomalies here and there that violated Plex’s rules.
So I…
moved everything out of Plex’s directory structure
Plex danced
ensured any and all Various Artists were completely cleared out of the db
fixed everything in jaikoz (a tag editor)
and moved it all back
…voila.
The flac files I had ripped, the bulk of my collection, were fine. But some of the one-off songs I had purchased from iTunes over the years were a mess. They were scattered throughout and inconsistently tagged. It was tedious going through all of them.
Anyway, thanks for the motivation. It’s nice not having Plex go into a conniption like “Ash” after he was hit in the head with a fire extinguisher in Alien every time I’d do a Various Artists search.
“It is the perfect music database… Its physical perfection is matched only by its hostility. I can’t lie to you about your chances, but… You have my sympathies.”
But, you got it working, great to hear.
Loose singles are a real problem for Plex. It’s not happy unless it can look up an album for every track. For my loose dance music and DJ mix tracks I created a new fake artist called “Club Tracks” and I treat it like VA, adding fake albums like “Techno DJ Mixes.” Plex does not like this and looks up incorrect metadata for Album Artist and some albums, but it’s the best solution I have found so far. This is a scenario I wish had formal support.
