New music Metadata agent doesn't like compilation albums or albums by multiple artists

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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There should be a “tag” set up for the new metadata music agent. I really don’t know where to place a post. :thinking:

On to the problems.

PROBLEM 1: With my old premium library, I had a bunch of compilation albums, all showing up under Various Artists as the “Artist”. That also included various soundtrack albums. I think all of the albums are still there, but the “bio” for Various Artists is now the bio for Patrick Doyle. And that includes his genres, moods styles and related artists. On the positive side, I have reviews for many of the compilation/soundtrack albums.

PROBLEM 2: I have albums by Elton John, Willie Nelson, AND albums by Elton John & Leon Russell and WIllie Nelson & Leon Russell. That should be four separate artists. Plex combined all of the Elton John and Elton John & Leon Russel albums into one artist, Elton John / Leon Russell, with the bio for Elton John. It did the same thing for Willie Nelson and Leon Russell (Willie Nelson / Leon Russell), with a bio for Willie Nelson and a picture of Leon Russell.

I corrected the bad info with “Split apart” and then matched manually to get the albums to show. Haven’t decided how to tackle the various artists problem yet.

I believe all of my music is tagged properly, with track artist, album artist, etc. It worked with the old system, so some tweaking might be required for the now one.

The albums are listed on MusicBrainz, with the multiple artists as artists.

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Problem 1:
you had at least one album in your folder for Patrick Doyle, which actually is a ‘Various Artists’ album.
If you have ‘Prefer Local Metadata’ activated, this can already be caused by one track in one album, which has a deviating Track Artist.
You best start by looking out for albums without ‘Album Artist’ (or with a deviating Album Artist) within the Patrick Doyle folder.

Then Fix Match on the Various Artists “artist” in your library, so it goes back to “Various Artists”.
Then select the Patrick Doyle albums and edit their Album Artist back to Patrick Doyle.

Problem 2:
Plex currently doesn’t support albums by several artists. If it encounters such an album, it usually picks the first artist and assigns the album to this one alone.
That’s why the collaboration between Elton John and Leon Russel ended up under Elton John.
There is nothing at the moment that can be done do solve that “properly”. This is currently under consideration how it can be improved.

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Understand problem 2. I’m sure it will be fixed. By the way, did I mention the new metadata is great? Pass it on please.

Problem 1: The Patrick Doyle info is grabbed from the soundtrack for the Disney movie “Brave,” I assume There is no Patrick Doyle album, per se. The album is under the folder “Various Artists”. The sub-folder for the album is called simply, “Brave Original Soundtrack.” The embedded tags for the album artist on all tracks is “Various”, and then each track also has a “Track Artist” assigned to it in the metadata.

Plex Web shows the artist as “Various” for that album, lists the tracks, each one with the appropriate artist, so I think it’s reading the embedded metadata properly I’m not sure I understand what I did wrong, or why Plex chose this album to use as the bio.

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Apparently, this release is listed at MB not under Various Artists but as Patrick Doyle.
https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/e83fc9cc-a6e0-43d7-85d7-cf080daa2ef9
But since it shares an Artist folder with your other VA albums, they all became “infected” by Patrick Doyle.

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Damn! I’ll fix it manually. I do have “Prefer Local Metadata” enabled, so I’m a little surprised that it used the MB data instead.

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It uses prefer embedded for thing like album title, album art, track artist, track title, however, it does still attempt to match against MusicBrainz, so we can do things like get the artist photos and bios, as well as album reviews. :slight_smile:

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HA! Well obviously I’ll have to move that album into a Patrick Doyle folder, so I don’t confuse Plex. Thanks.

Guess I get to try out the no Plex Dance Rumor.

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Yeah, there can be a little bit of massaging of data to make sure everything is in MusicBrainz and is correct there (I’ve been working away adding some content I have into MusicBrainz for a while. Still got a bit to go!), but overall, it’s a huge improvement!

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Massaging? Time for a beating. :grin: Patrick Doyle has hurt me, and things were going so well.

I tried moving the offending album into it’s own folder (Patrick Doyle >>>Brave ORiginal Soundtrack), fixed the embedded tags so the album artist was Patrick Doyle, then tried “Fix Match” for the Various Artists folder. as @OttoKerner suggested. I get this:

Various_FixMatch
Various_FixMatch733×556 42.7 KB

and obviously, none of them are a match for various artists.

To top it off, Brave is still in the List of albums under “Various,” and it’s not shown in the artists under “Patrick Doyle” Well, there is no Patrick Doyle artist available for it to be listed under.

I’m going to leave it for tonight, but I suspect I’ll be Plex Dancing about a 100 albums tomorrow.

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Don’t forget about ‘Search Options’ on that screen.
And I urge you to use ‘Various Artists’ and not just ‘Various’.

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Thanks Otto. I’m pretty sure the tags are actually “Various Artists” in the embedded metadata, I’ve tried to be consistent. I’ll check them before I do anything else. The folder itself is named “Various” - not sure if that should matter since Plex is supposed to use the embedded info first.

If I use the search options, that basically assigns another agent – so the “Various Artist” albums won’t be using the new one, correct? Not sure I want that to happen.

No big deal. The migration has gone incredibly well, except for a couple of things. Still think I’ll be dancing tomorrow, though.

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I’ve been doing my artists one by one as I verify MusicBrainz and AllMusic. The beauty of this is any fixes made there benefit the whole Plex community :slight_smile:

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I wish I was as dedicated. I’ve been using MusicBrainz Picard to tag all of my files for the last couple of months, since I found out it was going to be the “source” for the music data. About 6 months ago, I decided to start over, and deleted and re-added a few albums/artists a day after fixing tags and artwork. Good ol’ Pete might have been one of the earlier additions to the library and not quite up to the standards I developed along the way.

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Yeah, I’ve been adding things into MusicBrainz, ripping with XLD, then tagging with Picard, and submitting AcoustIDs. Plus scanning artwork too. :sweat_smile:

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I have the feeling that I am going to have a ton of problems with certain sections of my library (not yet refreshed metadata).

my music library consists of extremely tagged (via picard and others) and organized according to my own preferred file path scheme, with slight deviations for certain types.

this is not going to change for plex or anything else.

basically

/audio/FILETYPE/firstletter@album artist/album artist/album year - album title [FILETYPE]/track# - artist - title.flac

which ends up

/audio/FLAC/A/A Perfect Circle/2003 - Thirteenth Step [FLAC]/01 - A Perfect Circle - The Package.flac

I also have specific sections/alternate formatting for Various, Soundtrack, Techno

for all soundtracks, the album artist is set to Soundtrack.
for all various artists, the album artist is set to Various
for all techno, the album artist is set to Techno

/audio/FLAC/_Soundtrack/1967 - A Fistful of Dollars [FLAC]/01 - Ennio Morricone - La resa dei conti.flac

^^^^ my album artist = Soundtrack, not Ennio Morricone

/audio/FLAC/_Various/1992 - Ambient Dub, Volume 1- The Big Chill [FLAC]/01 - Original Rockers - Sexy Selector.flac

^^^^ my album artist = Various, not Various Artists.

I already have prefer local metadata enabled, so I expect most of the mainstream stuff to flow through.

I really really really really hate the enforced use of “Various Artists”.

And I really hate any non respecting of tagged album artist field.

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I don’t foresee much trouble for you.
But you absolutely must have all-matching AlbumArtist tags within an AlbumArtist folder on disc.

All issues I had during testing were rooted in the violation of that iron rule. Since I was working with a set of files which were collected over a period of more than 20 years. And they were in an ugly state, tag-wise.

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Yeah – That’s why I deleted the music library a few months ago and started over. I’m pretty sure some were even older than 20 years, I did find two compilation albums with “Various” rather than “Various Artists.” I think they were albums I had tagged with MP3Tag and used Discogs as a tag source. That has been corrected

The “Brave” soundtrack insisted on staying in the Various section until I did a “Fix Match”

Probably a stupid question, the compilation albums are shown under the artist “Various.” Should that be “Various Artists” since they are now all tagged with that as the album artist. I tried the search options and found “Various Artists - add compilation to this artist”, applied it and the artist title hasn’t changed.

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Simply edit their Album Artist.

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I’m going to mark this as “resolved.” Fixing the embedded tags fixed the weird artist bio for various artists. The other problem of multiple artist collaboration albums isn’t resolved, but I almost got a promise it was being looked at. :wink:

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Shouldn’t Plex just populate this automatically when it encouters an album with:
a) multiple Artists (TPE1)
b) empty Album Artist (TPE2)
c) TCMP = TRUE

How does the new Plex scanner handle albums with tracks from multiple years by the way?