I added my ripped CD collection to Plex. In a few I noticed that a single artists was matched to wrong albums, and was showing up multiple times in the Artist view. See “Classique Metropolitain” below:
It looks to me like your file names might be the problem. For one thing, the disc number should not be in the file name. Follow the advice in this post and see if it improves things.
Also, is your server set up to prefer local metadata?
You’d think so, but no, Plex still depends on it. Even more than it used to, but I don’t know why. That’s something I’ve been discussing with one of the developers.
For multi-disc albums, if the metadata has the discnumber tag set, and ‘album’ and ‘artist’ tags (except for ‘various artist’ albums) are identical for all tracks on all discs, it won’t matter if the files are in a single folder, or in ./disc1 and ./disc2 subfolders. Here’s a screenshot of one of mine:
The folder structure for the above is: Music/Pop/Abba/The Definitive Collection/trackname.flac
Note the track numbers are shown as “01/xx.” That still works, I think, but I think it’s not recommended. I’ve changed them to just tracknumbers without the “/disc#.” (this is an old screenshot).
Oh, one other thing: I did a little testing when they were developing the recent improvements in metadata scanning. One thing that I learned from that is that it’s best if the ‘album’ tag is identical to the folder name where the tracks are stored (as much as possible, anyway. Tags allow ‘/’ characters, for example, but folder names don’t). This caused some real headaches with my classical albums.
You now always need to have the principal structure of
music / album artist / album title / tracks
But it wasn’t clear what to do with certain albums. I decided to start from scratch.
I removed the Music library from Plex, stopped the PMS, deleted the cache files related to music, and started the server. I created a new folder in which I put a single album, the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, and then added this folder as a new Music library, using “Prefer Local Metadata” option.
The result is that after scanning, the album appears under Cassius (which was one of the artists in the old library), instead of Various Artists.
How should my compilation/soundtrack albums be tagged and structured on the disk? Here’s what I have so far:
Album folder is in /Music/Plex/Various Artists/(1994) Pulp Fiction (Soundtrack)
File is named 06 – Ricky Nelson – Lonesome Town.mp3
The relevant ID3v2 tags in the file are:
TIT2 (Title/songname/content description): Lonesome Town
TALB (Album/Movie/Show title): Pulp Fiction (Soundtrack)
TSRC (ISRC (international standard recording code)): USCA20501028
TENC (Encoded by): dBpoweramp Release 16.6
TPUB (Publisher): MCA
TSSE (Software/Hardware and settings used for encoding): -V="1"
TMED (Media type): CD (Lossless)
TCON (Content type): Soundtrack (24)
TYER (Year): 1994
TRCK (Track number/Position in set): 6/16
TPOS (Part of a set): 1/1
TPE1 (Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)): Ricky Nelson
TCOM (Composer): Baker Knight
This screenshot shows the album info, after scanning:
Another issue, however. I have Album Art set to Local Files Only, but PMS doesn’t seem to respect it and loads album art from Plex Music. Is there a way to fix it?
Look for artwork files in the folder. If the folder was ever “touched” by Windows Media Player, there might be (even unbeknownst to you) hidden album art in there.
Please also copy the content of the guid="... property from the Plex XML info of track 1 of that album
and paste it into here.
Is it possible that your files have several cover pictures embedded? And that Plex is picking the wrong one out of these?
Using the cover.jpg is a workaround though. It has the added advantage, that you can use the best quality file you can find (which would be unsuitable for embedding due to its size).
