In 1944 I went to add a few music files. After scanning, more than half of my library changed the song title to “Unknown title”.
After 1973 was released, I performed a complete refresh of all metadata an now my entire library show the song titles, but changed my entire 19k+ library to “Various Artists” with the exception of one artist… Xzibit.
I am at a loss at how to fix this. There have always been issues with music metadata but nothing like this!
Let me guess: you have activated ‘prefer local metadata’ and almost none of your files contain the ‘Album Artist’ metatag.
Or you have tracks from several artists in the same folder in your media storage.
Please see https://support.plex.tv/articles/upgrade-music-libraries-new-metadata-system/ for an introduction to the new system.
Yep! Both of those guesses are true and just the way I want it! Why can’t it just read the ID3 metadata that I’ve worked on for a very long time? Every other software reads it just fine… But Plex has to be different?
And GET RID of the album artist field!!! It’s useless!
That’s funny!
What’s funny? It literally is useless! Artist states the artist of a song. What the hell is Album Artist? If an album has more than one artist is just says “Various Artist.” I just look at that and say “Well no $h!t!”
I don’t think the Album Artist tag is useless, but I do think Plex care too much about the tag for organizing the library. Track artist should be more relevant in the library management.
kd6icz is putting it a bit bluntly but he’s not wrong, the way that Plex is internally set up with Albums introduces a lot of bugs as the media scanner tries to populate Album-level metadata based on metadata that actually resides at the track level. Albums with songs from multiple years are also screwed up. Also, the lack of support for “Part Of Compilation” tag means the scanner has to guess based on various fuzzy criteria what albums are compilations or not.
But fixing it permanently will require an almost total rewrite of the music functionality under the hood, not holding my breath for that.
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