I have tried most of the suggestions related to missing or wron metadata for Music compilation albums. None of them worked but I ran into some weird behaviour.
missing artist name on the album screen
by default only the song title is shown. but for most compilations the album art is shown. it is being picked up from folder.jpg inside the albums folder.
When I set my advanced library settings like this
Plex starts immediately working on my albums but nothing changes.
When I now right click on 1 of the albums and refresh the meta data it looks promissing
the album art of the 'refreshed album has been updated.
Yes, this is indeed a bug in the new “Plex Music” scanner, it does not populate the track artist (confusingly called original_title) field in the metadata_items table of the internal sqllite database correctly. I reproduced this today with a little test library: all MP3 files, ID3v2.3 tags, using “Plex Music” as the scanner with only local metadata.
Let’s look at “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me”
Album Artist (tagged in all tracks) is Angelo Badalamenti
Track Artist is Angelo Badalamenti for most tracks, but tracks 7 and 9 have other Track Artists. This ends up like this:
if the album artist for a compilation is set, the track artist is stored in the original_title field in the DB, but only when it’s not equal to the album artist
if it’s a regular various artists compilation (so no Album Artist, and all individual Track Artists), then the track artists are not stored in the original_title field in the DB
First case the scanner works as expected, the second case the expected behaviour would be to set the Album Artist to “Various Artists”, but also populate the original_title field to the individual track artists.
What is incomplete? The second album has no album artist, it’s a compilation.
Various Artists compilations should always have the “Album Artist” tag empty, as this breaks localisation otherwise. Tagging it with “Various Artists” (in English) means it would be displayed wrong for other languages, this is standard for pretty much all music library software. If Plex requires hardcoded Album Artists for albums that don’t have one, that’s a basic design flaw. And the frustrating thing is, the old “Plex Music Scanner” handles it correctly - this is a new problem!
Agreed however, this is how iTunes implemented it with their proprietary ‘compilation’ tag.
Plex doesn’t. Therefore it needs an Album Artist metatag.
For Plex, a compilation is just a normal album.
“Proprietary” is a big word, it’s just the TCMP id3 tag that everyone can use (and many others do, since the advantages are obvious: no need anymore for fuzzy criteria in your media scanner to find out if an album is a compilation or not).
But even without it, Emby, and others like foobar2k, Musicmatch etc handle track artists on compilations correctly without this mandatory Album Artist tagging. Even Plex was able to populate track artists correctly with the previous scanner!
Same issue as above: ‘Album Artist’ meta tag is empty.
Populate it with ‘Various Artists’ (or any other artist name you use for all your sampler albums. )
Most important thing is that has to be consistent for all tracks of an album.
Correct, this is the workaround until Plex fixes this bug (or “feature”): Set the Album Artist for all your compilations to “Various Artists” or “Diverse Artiesten” (if you want it in Dutch) using your tag editor, and refresh the metadata so the scanner runs again.
This might break things in other music library managers/players, but at least it will be ok in Plex.
Another option, if you can code, is to write a script (in Python/whatever) that reads the Artist tags from the files and writes the track artists into the Plex database.
An update.
The first 10 Albums went fine. I’ve added ‘Diverse Artiesten’ and both album art as well as the artist is shown for those 10 compilations.
Then i’ve uploaded compilation 11. this one did not appread in my list of albums.
Weird… but I finallly found out that although I’ve put Diverse artiesten in that album it got store under Various Artists.
Not correct.
So I’ve removed that 11th album and tried another one. For that one there was no album art, no artists and again Various Artist…
I’ve removed the whole library of compilations and now nothing works anymore.
Even the setup that I showed in my initial question is not working anymore.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to solve this ?
Do you have activated ‘prefer local metadata’?
If you did not, the album artist may get overwritten by whatever is in the Musicbrainz database for this album.
In the worst case, you might have to migrate to use ‘Various Artists’ for every compilation.
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