Good luck. Been broke since the new scanner.
I’m a Sonos user who started using Plex as a “music service” within Sonos after I exceeded Sonos’s 65,000 track limit. Sonos’s Music Library handles compilation albums much better than Plex does. Every artist appears in the list of Artists even if they only appear on a compilation album. Sonos does not use the Album Artist tag - all my albums have a null value. Compilation albums show the artist name for each track on that album. Apparently I have to add the value “Album Artist” to every compilation album in order to make Plex display the artist for each track. How difficult would it be for Plex to handle compilation albums the same way Sonos does?
You’ve run into the issue that Plex does not index track artists (for filter/navigation/etc), it only indexes album artists. Track artists are stored as a simple text field, so Plex can display them but can’t do fancy things with them like include them in filters/sort/list/etc. So when you select an artist, Plex will show only the items where the he is Album Artist.
In contrast, Sonos, iTunes/Apple Music, Spotify etc all index both track artist and album artist, so if you click on the artist, you get all tracks from them, own albums as well as compilation tracks.
The poor handling of compilations also comes because Plex doesn’t support the “Part Of Compilation” field (TCMP in id3, COMPILATION in Vorbis, cpil in MP4), so instead the Plex Music scanner has to guess (based on filenames, foldername, album artist, etc) whether an album is a compilation. Filling in the Album Artist tag with “Various Artists” makes it easier for the scanner to do so (it basically treats a compilation as a regular album by a dude called “Various Artists”), but of course still doesn’t make the tracks appear under the respective artists.
It would be quite a lot of development work to fix this at this point, unfortunately. The devs basically have to write (and test) code everywhere along the stack: the scanner, the internal database structure, the API that the server and clients communicate over, the Plex Web UI, and all the client apps. I can understand why Plex devs are hesitant to do such a fundamental change, for something (compilations) they may not care very much about themselves. I personally don’t expect this to be fixed until a major version change (PMS 2.0 or something).
Thanks for sharing. I do understand that fixing the Compilations issud would require much coding but I think it makes sense that plex can at minimum allow folks to rename artists in the Various folder so that we can do the work to get albums in that folder setup under the appropriate artist or album name.
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