Does that mean that if I subsequently make changes to the metatags and update the metadata, will the changes be reflected?
EDITED.
The new music scanner occasionally completely ignores embedded metadata (see my example with Patrick Doyle at the beginning of the thread) and applies a match, possibly based on MusicBrainz info.
In the case mentioned, the album was in a “Various Artists” folder, the Album Artist tag was “Various Artists” for all of the tracks. The individual tracks had their own unique tags (most were Patrick Doyle, but not all) While perhaps not technically correct for that album, I would think Plex should honour my decision to call it a compilation album.
The part that confused me, and I still don’t understand, is that the album displayed in Plex Web as a compilation album, had Various Artists as the artist for the album and showed the track artist as the ones used in the metatags. It just assigned the bio for Patrick Doyle as the overall bio for all of the Various Artists albums.
But aside from that, and the several collaboration albums I’ve had to hunt down and fix manually, everything has worked perfectly.
Yes! __
Not quite. I had a couple of albums by “Hall and Oates” where they used their full names as the album artist (Daryl Hall and John Oates) Their listed that way on MusicBrainz, Discogs and almost everywhere else. In fact, the albums were tagged that way with Picard, which gets its info directly from MB. In any event, changing the Album Artist tag to be consistent, using either of the possible titles, and countless refreshes of album and artist, still left me with a “Hall and Oates” artist and associated albums, and a “Daryl Hall and John Oates” artist and albums. The only cure was the Plex Dance. 
LOL. In this case it’d been quicker to just edit the artist name in Plex.
I tried. Left me with two Hall and Oates artists. Wouldn’t group them as one. Besides, I want the tags to work with Plex, even if Plex is wrong. Now it shows them all as Hall and Oates, but some albums have the full name as track artist. All good.
Do you have ‘Prefer local metadata’ activated?
Yes. Always have. Which is why some of the explanations have confused me.
I can only assume that one of the H&O artists was still matched to some other agent. Normally, the first metadata refresh or Fix Match should bring it over to the new ‘Plex Music’ ahent. Why this didn’t happen in this case, I’d be interested to know.
If you encounter a similar issue, always take a look at the Plex XML info of a track and the look at the contents of the guid, parentGuid and grandparentGuid properties.
guid = track
parentGuid = album
grandparentGuid = albumartist
on a fully matched album, each of those should begin with plex://
If one of them doesn’t, it should be investigated.
The album that I had to Plex Dance was added just a few days ago. It was the “Private Eyes” album, which is (correctly) by “Daryl Hall and John Oates” I changed that one use “Hall and Oates” as the album artist, but left the track artist as it’s supposed to be. The other albums were left out of the dance. They were not re-scanned.
I just checked again, I knew the XML guid trick before and did check before I danced, and all are and have always been to the new plex agent. All of the tracks, for all albums even have the same MusicBrainz, artistID in the metatags that they use, both before and after. Those never changed, It might be a glitch, or may have been a one off thing that only hit me
The new scanner is not working like the old one and does not praise VA discs like it used to.
This is how a VA album would look like before the update, as you can see the song name - artist format.
Now there is no artist only the song name.
And as you can see there is nothing in the artist field even when using local meta data.
This needs to be fixed ASAP as my hole library is screwed up now. The way VA albums were handled before the update was excellent. When selecting prefer local meta data plex needs to pull in the song name and artist and display it like the first picture in this post, as it used to. And all of my tags and folder structure are immaculate.
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Which file type are you using?
Here is how it’s looking with mp3 and flac files. Just like it is supposed to.
mp3 and flac
It’s only since the update.
Please fetch the content of the Plex XML info from one of the affected tracks.
Make sure that the library scan has actually finished. (may take a long time)
Look at Settings - Server - Status - Alerts
and
Settings - Server - Manage - Console
for clues about that.
.flac
<MediaContainer size="1" allowSync="1" identifier="com.plexapp.plugins.library" librarySectionID="19" librarySectionTitle="Music" librarySectionUUID="200bb1bd-78c5-400b-8a19-3e5993cd8ca3" mediaTagPrefix="/system/bundle/media/flags/" mediaTagVersion="1570581928">
<Track ratingKey="207908" key="/library/metadata/207908" parentRatingKey="207907" grandparentRatingKey="161365" guid="local://207908" parentGuid="com.plexapp.agents.none://207907?lang=xn" grandparentGuid="com.plexapp.agents.lastfm://Various%20Artists?lang=en" librarySectionTitle="Music" librarySectionID="19" librarySectionKey="/library/sections/19" type="track" title="These Days" grandparentKey="/library/metadata/161365" parentKey="/library/metadata/207907" grandparentTitle="Various Artists" parentTitle="Triple J Hottest 100 Volume 7" summary="" index="1" parentIndex="1" viewCount="1" lastViewedAt="1570844985" thumb="/library/metadata/207907/thumb/1570927967" art="/library/metadata/161365/art/1570703666" parentThumb="/library/metadata/207907/thumb/1570927967" grandparentThumb="/library/metadata/161365/thumb/1570703666" grandparentArt="/library/metadata/161365/art/1570703666" duration="254573" addedAt="1570789904" updatedAt="1570927967">
<Media id="562105" duration="254573" bitrate="968" audioChannels="2" audioCodec="flac" container="flac">
<Part accessible="1" exists="1" id="579038" key="/library/parts/579038/1570789151/file.flac" duration="254573" file="/mnt/nas1/Media/Music/Various Artists/Triple J Hottest 100 Volume 7/1-01.Powderfinger - These Days.flac" size="30812067" container="flac" hasThumbnail="1">
<Stream id="1004571" streamType="2" selected="1" codec="flac" index="0" channels="2" bitrate="968" audioChannelLayout="stereo" bitDepth="16" samplingRate="44100" displayTitle="Unknown (FLAC Stereo)"/>
</Part>
</Media>
<Extras size="0"> </Extras>
</Track>
</MediaContainer>
.mp3
<MediaContainer size="1" allowSync="1" identifier="com.plexapp.plugins.library" librarySectionID="19" librarySectionTitle="Music" librarySectionUUID="200bb1bd-78c5-400b-8a19-3e5993cd8ca3" mediaTagPrefix="/system/bundle/media/flags/" mediaTagVersion="1570581928">
<Track ratingKey="179643" key="/library/metadata/179643" parentRatingKey="179642" grandparentRatingKey="161365" guid="local://179643" parentGuid="com.plexapp.agents.none://179642?lang=xn" grandparentGuid="com.plexapp.agents.lastfm://Various%20Artists?lang=en" librarySectionTitle="Music" librarySectionID="19" librarySectionKey="/library/sections/19" type="track" title="Forever (Ian Van Dahl Remix)" grandparentKey="/library/metadata/161365" parentKey="/library/metadata/179642" grandparentTitle="Various Artists" parentTitle="Clubber's Guide To... Ibiza 2002" summary="" index="1" parentIndex="1" thumb="/library/metadata/179642/thumb/1570928184" art="/library/metadata/161365/art/1570703666" parentThumb="/library/metadata/179642/thumb/1570928184" grandparentThumb="/library/metadata/161365/thumb/1570703666" grandparentArt="/library/metadata/161365/art/1570703666" duration="237844" addedAt="1561967754" updatedAt="1570928192">
<Media id="533820" duration="237844" bitrate="128" audioChannels="2" audioCodec="mp3" container="mp3">
<Part accessible="1" exists="1" id="549220" key="/library/parts/549220/1561967691/file.mp3" duration="237844" file="/mnt/nas1/Media/Music/Various Artists/Ministry Of Sound/Clubber's Guide To... Ibiza 2002/1-01.Dee Dee - Forever (Ian Van Dahl Remix).mp3" size="3833681" container="mp3" deepAnalysisVersion="4" hasThumbnail="1" requiredBandwidths="126,126,126,126,126,126,126,126">
<Stream id="983071" streamType="2" selected="1" codec="mp3" index="0" channels="2" bitrate="128" albumGain="-8.09" albumPeak="1.000000" albumRange="7.769560" audioChannelLayout="stereo" gain="-8.09" loudness="-12.67" lra="7.49" peak="1.000000" requiredBandwidths="126,126,126,126,126,126,126,126" samplingRate="44100" displayTitle="Unknown (MP3 Stereo)"/>
</Part>
</Media>
<Extras size="0"> </Extras>
</Track>
</MediaContainer>
The GrandParentguid tells us that this library hasn’t been converted yet.
Did you (try to) convert it?
https://support.plex.tv/articles/upgrade-music-libraries-new-metadata-system/
The problem started strait after the server update and I did do the music library update to see if it would fix the issue. I might just delete the library and recreate it and see what happens. Plex is running on CentOS 7 as a VM in esxi so I have snapshots before the update so I can roll back.
Btw if you just tried to refresh just one album, it means you are not using the new code at all. You must refresh at the artist level first.
Do als take a look at
Settings - Server - Agents - Albums
Make sure that everywhere there the line Local Media Assets is in the top position.
