Server Version#: 1.40.4.8626 (and prior)
Player Version#: N/A
When the Plex Music scanner (with the Plex Music agent) scans the file system for new music, even when “Prefer local metadata” is enabled, this flag is not always respected. This is most commonly seen when adding anything with the album artists “Original Soundtrack” and/or “Various Artists”.
In either case, it may throw do one of the following:
a new album with the tagged album artist “Various Artists” may be assigned to “Original Soundtrack” in the Music Library
a new album with the tagged album artist “Original Soundtrack” may be assigned to “Various Artists” in the Music Library
a new album with the tagged album artist “Original Soundtrack” may be assigned to the artist “Patrick Doyle” in the Music Library
Enabling this checkbox only after an album has been assigned the “wrong” album artist, won’t help.
If it’s unchecked, the album artist that’s assigned to this album on Musicbrainz.org is used, no matter what is in the embedded meta tags.
To clear that up, you’ll need to enable “Prefer local metadata” first, then perform the Plex Dance “light” with the whole album.
(“light” meaning without step 4)
Enabling this checkbox only after an album has been assigned the “wrong” album artist, won’t help.
I think what I was indicating may have been misinterpreted: that flag has been enabled since I first configured this specific server 2 years ago… (itself configured from a backup and migration of a server that was created over 4 years ago).
If it’s unchecked, the album artist that’s assigned to this album on Musicbrainz.org is used, no matter what is in the embedded meta tags.
With this accounted for, this would still be demonstrative of incorrect behavior as MUSICBRAINZ_% tags are present in the file tags due to having been tagged with Musicbrainz Picard first, then cleaned up afterwards with MP3Tag. In particular, 89ad4ac3-39f7-470e-963a-56509c546377 (present in the tag herein for MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID) is the album artist UUID for “Various Artists” on Musicbrainz.
Likewise, assuming that I misread your statement herein and that it ignores the tags in full in order to retrieve the album information, and the album artist is retrieved dynamically from Musicbrainz based on the album title, then this would be further evidence of incorrect behavior.
I’m using the album “Any Given Sunday: Music from the Motion Picture” here as it is one of the most recent albums I’ve added to my library, but I need to make it clear that I can reproduce this at any time by literally adding an album with the album artist tag set to “Original Soundtrack” - regardless of the album, the actual album artist, or the values present in the MUSICBRAINZ_% tags; and this behavior repeatedly occurs in spite of the fact that the setting “Prefer local metadata” was, is, and remains enabled.
To that end: with the above conditions in place, if I add another album right now (as this has been happening now for several months) and the album artist in the tag for ALBUMARTIST is “Original Soundtrack”, it is a 100% guarantee that it will instead be matched by Plex to the Album Artist “Patrick Doyle”. I don’t know why it’s choosing Patrick Doyle in particular, but it has been doing so ever since I added a single album with him as such. Before him, it would assign “Original Soundtrack” to “Various Artists”.
A database health check or maybe a precautionary rebuild would add further confirmation.
Confirm that the embedded ‘album artist’ tags of all tracks in all albums, do match the folder name of the 'artist 'parent folder which holds the album.
remove all albums that are attributed to either Patrick Doyle or Original Soundtrack. It is important to get them all, so that these album artists are removed from the list in Plex.
wait one week, during which the server is still running and is able to perform its nightly maintenance cycle
add the albums back. Make sure to disable automatic and periodic library scans beforehand. Only trigger the library scan manually, once, after you are certain that all files have been copied back completely.
