Server Version#: 1.24.5.5173
Player Version#: 4.63.0
This is such a weird problem, and I honestly have no idea how to fix it. I have in the entirety of my music catalog (according to mp3tag) 5 songs that are by The Beach Boys. However, Plex has The Beach Boys listed as the Album Artist on about 140 of my songs spanning across 32 different albums.
The only thing I’ve noticed that these songs might have in common is that they appear to all be either from a soundtrack or compilation album of various artists. So it’s possible that the Album Artist “Various Artists” might have something to do with it here. That being said, it’s not like every track with that metadata gets tagged with the Beach Boys, it’s just some of them.
Now, sometimes I can unmatch a song, and then if I go to match it again, that will do the trick and the song will display properly. However, that doesn’t always last. For example, if I were to unmatch and match again for some reason, it would default back to The Beach Boys. And even then sometimes I’ll try and unmatch/match and then nothing will happen.
Of course, I can always go in and manually edit the entry in Plex, fix the Artist, and that will correct it. But again, if you were to ever go in and use the “Fix Match” option, boom, right back to The Beach Boys.
So yeah, I’m at a bit of a loss here as to what the problem might be, or what else I can try to fix it that I’m not thinking of. Any advice would be appreciated.
Sure thing. I believe my server settings are set up properly regarding local metadata, I know I’ve gone through that article before and made sure I had followed the proper instructions. And I think my file/folder structure is generally in pretty good shape for identification purposes.
Anyway, here are a few of the problematic songs.
Actually, I realize now that those screenshots don’t show the Album Artist info. The first one, that field is blank, the other two show as “Various Artists”.
The only obvious thing I see is in the ‘Frozen’ track, the track number is ‘1/32.’ Plex has a problem when the tag is like this. Better to just be ‘1’ (this may not be causing this particular problem, but just eliminating known issues).
I assume the path you added to your library is O:\Music\Music?
And yes, the extra Music folder is a remnant from when I used iTunes primarily, I had that library set to O:\Music, and then it creates a whole subset of folders (Podcasts, Applications, Music, etc.), so the music was actually within another folder also called Music. But I made sure to point to that one when adding it to Plex.
Yeah, the track number can be a problem, and doing the same thing in discnumber is also a problem, if you have any multi-disc albums. There’s a screenshot in that How-To article about it.
I was just making sure it wasn’t pointed to O:\. That causes major issues.
I’m not sure what else might be causing this. I spent a lot of time getting my tags in order, and Plex has been nearly bulletproof for me for a couple of years now. Maybe someone else will tune it.
You probably need the “Album Artist” tag. Set it as “Various Artists” on all of your compilation albums (or any other album artist/name, as long as all of your compilation and soundtrack albums have the identical album artist)
As an aside, most of my albums have track numbers and disc numbers as “xx/xx” and work just fine. Maybe I’m just lucky on that point. (I have about 3000 albums)
Sorry, I wasn’t clear in my earlier message. The “Album Artist” tag is set to “Various Artists” for just about all of the songs in question, it’s just the screenshots I posted did not show them listed, so that was just a failure on my part to accurately screenshot the metadata.
heh-heh… my experience has been that “just about all” eventually fails and you end up with mis-named artists and albums at some point. Every track in a compilation album, or albums with multiple artists like soundtracks will have better, expected results if the album artist is included on every track.
You’ll likely have to refresh the metadata for those albums if you do change or add the album artist tag.
I’ve also had this problem too. It eventually fixed itself; probably I made a beneficial change while doing maintenance in other areas of my library.
As far as I can tell when this happens your VA artists and your Beach Boys could both be tagged and organized correctly… it is some other tag or folder problem that is the root cause. The selection of Beach Boys as the rogue name seems to be effectively random, which makes it hard to fix.
I’ve had a variety of issues a bit like yours. Try this. Select one of the offending albums, move it to a folder that’s not scanned by Plex (I e. not one of your Plex library folders). Update your music library so you can see it’s disappeared in Plex. Use your favourite mp3 tag editor to tidy up the tags, especial track numbers and make sure the album artist has some meaningful and consistent information in it. Then move the album back to your music folder and tell Plex to update your music library.
After some further digging I think I was able to solve the problem. I took a more detailed look at my folder structure and discovered that while probably 75% of my “Various Artists” albums were correctly located in the “Various Artists” folder, the other 25% were in other places, like “Various” or “Compilations”, just because that’s what iTunes must have done with them when they were first imported.
Anyway, what I did was I went through mp3tag, made sure all of the offending albums had the correct Album Artist designation if they didn’t already, and then moved all the album folders into the “Various Artists” artist folder. Then I let Plex re-scan the files and do its thing. When I checked back on it later, it seemed to have done the trick, all the Beach Boys references were gone.
What’s interesting is that there were a number of albums that were already correctly in the “Various Artists” folder that were affected by this problem as well, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to fix that. But I guess by moving the other albums, Plex sorted the rest out as well.
So, turns out your initial assumptions were correct after all, it was poor folder structure that caused the problem. Why Plex chose to fixate on The Beach Boys as its go to artist, we may never know. Thanks for the help!
