Music scanner ignores artist metadata and dumps everything under "Various Artists"

[arunasad]

Server Version#: 1.19.3.2764

All my MP3 files have “Artist” and some have “Album Artist” metadata filled in. However, Plex for some reasons ignores all that and shows “Various Artists” for pretty much all songs. Here is an example - this is how files look in Mp3tag:

And this is what Plex displays:

All files also have embedded album art, but Plex ignores that as well. To be clear, I don’t care about Pex organising songs by album. I simply want it do display song artists correctly…

[beckfield]

If your files are in a flat folder, not organized into albums, Plex is going to have trouble getting things right.
From https://support.plex.tv/articles/200265296-adding-music-media-from-folders/:

[arunasad]

They are individual songs/singles in a handful of folders by decade. I use playlists to organise songs, not albums. Plex used to display everything correctly for a long time. Just recently I noticed that it started putting multiple songs under unrelated artist name, so removed music library and added it again. This made things even worse with pretty much all songs now dumped under “Various Artists”. I suspect some recent Plex server update messed things up.

I would understand if Plex was having problems grouping songs into albums when they are in flat folder structure. But I don’t need any of that, I just want to it to be able to display correct song name and artist, that’s all…

[beckfield]

Plex recently (7 or 8 months ago) re-wrote the music metadata scanner. It’s a lot more powerful than it was, and the “Plex Dance” has been pretty much eliminated, which is a huge improvement.

Unfortunately, it became much pickier about the folder structure. I don’t understand why that is. It doesn’t make sense to me that it should be that way if it’s better at reading tags, but that’s how it is.

If it was working better for you before, you might try changing to the old scanner in your Music Library settings and see if it helps:

[arunasad]

Thanks. I tried the old scanner. It’s somewhat better, but still lots of songs come with Various Artists. Looking at metadata there doesn’t seem to be any pattern, some songs display correct artist, some not, without any obvious difference in metadata. The old scanner also doesn’t display any album art (it previously did). Tried pretty much all other options in advanced scanner settings with no luck…

[RandomNinjaAtk02]

Your biggest issue is that it doesn’t look like your files are tagged with Album Artist. Album Artist is used for sorting.

[arunasad]

I could add Album Artists if that would fix it, but I don’t think that’s the issue here. If you look at an example in my original post The Beatles - Yellow Submarine track has Album Artist but in Plex, the artist is still “Various Artists”. The same with lots of other songs that have Album Artist in the metadata.