Plex does not show the music as an album but as individual songs.
What is going wrong and how can I solve it?
Looks like you’ve configured your library to prefer embedded metadata from tags within those music files. Apparently your embedded tags only list an Artist, but no Album Artist. If there’s no same-named artist, Plex (and other apps) depend on an album artist to determine which tracks actually belong to the same album.
Imagine you have dozens of “Best of” / “Greatest Hits” albums and Plex will accidentally treat them all as the same release.
Long story short…
Solution:
Correct the embedded metadata to include an album artist for those compilation / various artists albums.
It might also be beneficial if you review the album title… audio files have a separate tag to identify the CD# (otherwise each disc will be listed again as its own album).
Example
| Tag | Value |
|---|---|
| Album Title | De Foute CD 2021 |
| Album Artist | Various Artists |
| CD # | 1/3 |
[edit: here’s some additional guides on required embedded tags → [HowTo] Configure Plex to use embedded metadata (music)]
Alternative workaround (not a solution)
Multi-select all the tracks and select Merge from the context menu
Yet another option
If your files are properly named/organized… disable the Prefer Local Metadata option in the library’s advanced preferences.
It is no fun, but like @tom80H said, there are some naming and tagging rules to follow. It is especially vital that the Album Artist tag is the same single artist name for every album, and if it is a compilation it must be the magic word “Various Artists.”
It’s possible that after you update your filenames and tags and rescan it still might not look right. You should either do the Plex Dance with the changed files, or actually delete and recreate the library. I find the latter to take less time, just make sure you turn off Sonic Analysis and all the detailed metadata features until you know the basics are working correctly.
A program like mp3tag will make huge naming and tagging changes pretty easy once you get the hang of it.
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Thank you for your response and explanation. I just downloaded Tagr to adjust the properties. I entered “Various Artists” under “Album Artist”. I don’t see it in Plex. In Plex I see the name of the album. To test it I deleted the album and copied it again to my NAS.
I changed the settings to “prefer localdata” and to “embedded tags”
Plex doesn’t read meta tags from WAV files. Use FLAC, if you want to stay at lossless quality.
The disc number doesn’t belong in the Album Title. There is a dedicated meta tag for it.
Is it possible to covert WAV to MP3?
Of course. But as MP3 is not a lossless compression, you will lose some audio quality (but will save a lot hard drive space). And with “lose” I mean “throw away”. This lost quality cannot be restored by converting the MP3 back to WAV.
If you do it, I’d retain the original WAV version as a backup.
Or switch to FLAC or ALAC instead, which still produce smaller files, but retain the full quality of the WAV and support meta tags.
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Ok. I will search for an app to convert it to FLAC or ALAC. I will let you know if it works when I covert it.
Thanks for the information and explanation.
I used Tagr to adjust the metadata. Now I have three separate albums of “De Foute Cd 2021”. Is it also possible to make 1 album?
Yes, absolutely (as per some of the earlier posts ;)).
- Set the same album title for all 3 „discs“.
- Set the disc count to 3
- Set the disc # to match the respective discs.
Some apps combine the disc # and count in a single property (e.g. 1/3, 2/3 and 3/3).
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That is what I meant above with
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Thanx for the help.
The original name of the album was Q-Music Foute CD 1 and CD2. Plex sees it as different albums. I correct it and I have CD 1, 2 and 3 in on album.
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