Server Version#: 1.29.2.6364
Player Version#:No flaming idea
I am trying to get my metadata to match the tags that I’m able to maintain with mostly good results with my other media server. I’m really dying to move to Plex because of the seamless way that it streams content so that I can play my music playlists on portable devices - my iPhone for example - while I’m away from home.
The most glaring idiosyncrasy (should I spell that “idiot” syncrasy) is divining the name of an artist where the local metadata doesn’t have a name of an artist, which sometimes occurs in a compilation. It’s rearing it’s ugly head again this Christmas season (because of all the compilations of Christmas music that I have) by assigning all unknown artists (meaning no “Artist” tag) the name “Nederland Zingt” which I’m sure is the last one in the collating sequence.
Even if I go into MediaMonkey - what I’m using for tag edits - and editing the metadata, then going back into Plex and refreshing it, it’s still that silly artists’ name. The only way I can fix it is by going into Each.Individual.Bloody.Song in the Plex web interface and changing the name of the artist. Which I’m doing because I’m getting sick of this artist’s name. Anybody have any tips? Another tag editor? Anything??
Of utmost importance in Plex is the meta tag AlbumArtist.
You may be not very familar with it, because it is not that common in other players.
Most likely, your files only have the normal tag [Track]Artist in them.
But it is this meta tag, which (together with the AlbumTitle tag) is defining a certain Album in Plex. All tracks within one album must have identical content in their AlbumArtist meta tags.
Which means that with compilations and samplers, you need to set the AlbumArtist to “Various Artists”.
If an AlbumArtist tag is misssing, Plex will try to make sense from the rest of the existing tags. Which then can lead to the “contamination” of all samplers with the artist name of a single track of those samplers.
So, your course of action is this:
separate your samplers by AlbumArtist
create a folder for each of those different albumartist names
put all albums of a certain AlbumArtist inside the folder named after that album artist
use a metatag editor (recommendation for Windows and Mac: mp3tag) to add or modify the AlbumArtist meta tag to each track of each of your albums. This may sound like a daunting task, but there are ways to modify many tracks at once, and there are alsop ways to derive meta tags from file and folder names (and also vice versa).
After you have repaired your meta tags and brought a proper structure into your collection, you better start with a fresh music library in Plex.
compilations are hard in plex I use lidarr to rename and retag which works great but compilations always show as Various artists which works good only if you already have that artist in your library it will show on that artist page only in plex amp app as “also appears on” that’s the only way to get compilation tracks into a artist profile or manually edited each song to the artist
Thanks for the good advice. I actually went in and did something like this manually, but it would be nice to get it up to snuff. And MediaMonkey had the AlbumArtist tag, I will do a search and maintain on this field to see where the “vector” is for my friend “Nederland Zingt.” I can shift-select and mass edit tags within MediaMonkey, the only proviso being that it will ask for a confirmation box to find out if I “really want to edit all the tags in my selection”. Usually the answer is “Heck yeah.”
You will probably have to perform the Plex Dance for all misattributed albums.
Or simply perform “Fix Match” on this album artist in Plex. (provided you have already fixed meta tags and folder structure)
I can shift-select and mass edit tags within MediaMonkey, the only proviso being that it will ask for a confirmation box to find out if I “really want to edit all the tags in my selection”. Usually the answer is “Heck yeah.”