Music library weird behavior

[OttoKerner]

@calvaryss_comcast_net

All of my albums with artists named “Various Artists” (soundtracks, compilations, etc.) showed the artist as Elvis Presley. I was able to fix this by manually renaming the artist and they returned to normal.

Bad idea. This now will turn every other Various Artists release into an Elvis release.
I’d revert this edit and do it right (see below).

@calvaryss_comcast_net

The metadata should be good because these are all MP3 rips of CDs I legally own, about 340 albums or so.

Good metadata have nothing to do with the source of the media files. See below.

@calvaryss_comcast_net

I raised the server cache from 40MB to 100MB after reading that suggestion somewhere.

Don’t make such large jumps. Your NAS has small enough RAM, so don’t make it consume even more without need. Revert that for the time being. It’s certainly not necessary for a few hundred albums to change that value from the default.

@calvaryss_comcast_net

Many albums from artists I own multiple albums of changed to “Unknown Artist” or to “Artist + someone”. I would manually edit the artist name and the first one would save properly, but when I edited the next one it wouldn’t save and the first one I edited would revert to what it was before I edited it.

That is basically the same issue as with Elvis above. Don’t edit artist names within Plex.

@calvaryss_comcast_net

I have everything properly named by Artist->Album->Track

Good. But you need to follow these rules:

The key is in the embedded meta tags. Plex requires you to use the Album Artist tag (which is a separate tag than the regular Artist tag)

• It must not contain more than one name. Which means with collaboration-type albums, you must decide which artist shall be the “main” one. Then tag only this name. For traditional sampler-style albums, there is the special artist name “Various Artists” that you can use.
• All tracks of one particular album must have the same Album Artist tagged (each track can have a different Artist tag)
• You must use the folder structure “Album Artist” > “Album Title” > [Tracks]
• All albums which are stored inside one particular “Album Artist” folder must have identical content in their Album Artist meta tags.

Use a dedicated meta tagger app to set the Album Artist tag. The file properties tab of the Windows file explorer is inadequate.
I recommend mp3tag. It can help you with turning folder names into tags, or vice versa, generating folder structures and file names from meta tags.

Depending on how much editing you’ve performed already, it might be easier to scrap the whole music library and create it afresh – after you’ve gone through and changed the folder structure and embedded meta tags acording to the rules I laid out above.
If you’ve only edited a few albums/artists, perform the Plex Dance with just these.

If you are using mp3 files, set your meta data editor to use ID3v2.4 tags.