I created a new music library for an empty folder and configured it to prefer local metadata. Agents are ordered so that “Local media assets” is first for all libraries. I moved a set of music files into folders in the empty folder and re-scanned the library. In every instance where the artist and the album artist in the metadata are the same, Plex Media Server displays a blank field for the artist. The music files are all MP3s with ID3v2.3 tags; the artist is in TPE1 and the album artist is in TPE2. For reasons too numerous to list, my music folder structure doesn’t conform to Plex standards, but the artist should still be correctly set from the metadata. The attached zip file includes the server log, a dump of TPE1 and TPE2 for each music file, and a screenshot.
I was about to propose some troubleshooting questions about your configuration and tags, but I just looked at my own library and I see the same thing. I don’t recall it being this way in the past, but I couldn’t tell you when I last paid attention to this detail.
Been that way for quite some time (years I think). The only time you see the artist name is when it is different than album artist, like various artist albums, or if you have a track with “featuring so-and-so” as the artist.
m4A and mp4 audio will show the artist name every time. Not sure if the bug is with m4a files, or every other type of audio file. Guess it depends on your point of view.
I guess everyone else in the Plex music world is album-oriented, so they never look at a list of tracks by artist, and they don’t even see missing artist names a bug, much less a serious one. That’s perplexing, because most people I know personally use apps like Spotify and play individual tracks like I do. The Plex app on my Firestick doesn’t seem to even have an option to present a spreadsheet-style track view, so I get about 10 tracks per page. Even for the few artists that are displayed in the Plex Media Server, tracks are always listed in album order; there doesn’t seem to be any way to list them alphabetically by both artist and title like in Windows Explorer, Mp3Tag, Foobar2000, and every other app that I use for music files.
Music on Plex is VERY album orientated. You can’t even auto-generate a playlist based on a track artist or track genre in Plex. Been hoping for several years that they may see the error in thier ways, but I’m not holding my breathe. Like you, I rarely listen to albums, and the fact that Plex is so album/artist orientated is often frustrating.
I’m thankful for your support. Most Plex users are extremely defensive of the way Plex handles music libraries. I’m at a total loss trying to understand why Plex would go to the trouble to give users the ability to sort a music library by artist name…and then also go to the trouble to ensure that most of those names are blank! This absolutely looks like a bug to me, but apparently others don’t see it that way.
