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 Artisttag 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.)
Good luck!
