it has been added (i think), but it shows as individual tracks for each artist on the album. Since every track is by a different artist, it shows 40 entries, one for each track, not a single playable album.
Maybe easier to see in the plex webui how it shows.
dunno man, my system works across every other music/DAW/DJ Software I use (Swinsian, Pioneer Rekordbox, Native Instruments Traktor, Serato, Ableton). Not sure why Plex is the only one with an issue with the directory structure. Its the default structure used across many music apps of Artist > Album > Track.
My tagging is relatively simple, artist names go to Artist, Album in Album. See above, no other software has issues with my method of tagging across 8k+ tracks.
I do not have the Various Artists tag in Album Artist as Otto’s screenshot shows. I will try to add this for this album to see if it helps, but not really practical to comb thru 8k+ tracks to add, as I’d imagine this problem is going to be present on any album that has a track that contains more than one artist.
You have a blank album artist. Do you have “Prefer local metadata” set?
Either fix the missing album artist (required for grouping tracks into an album) or don’t prefer local metadata if you don’t want to change tags (I’m only partly sure this will work).
Interesting option to disable and probably the only practical one. I will post an update once the library update finishes from adding the Album Artist, as I would like to see if that works first.
Actually one more question - what does the “prefer local metadata” actually do? Will unchecking it overwrite locally set tags with ones from another source? IE: If I have my local genre set to Deep House, but on an online source it is set to Electronic, what happens? Or is this option only filling in locally unset tags with another source?
Do I need to completely delete/rebuild my library in order to see changes reflected? Setting Album Artist to Various Artists did nothing in the UI, neither did unchecking “prefer local metadata”.
if you select all the tracks in the web and set the same album and album artist for them it should merge them together. otherwise i’m not totally sure what happens if you switch and then try to rescan, we try to be pretty sticky and not move stuff around too much. if you recreate the library you won’t lose ratings or playback history.
Apologies for the delay as readding/building the library takes a lot of time with this many songs.
It looks like deleting the library and rescanning was necessary. Unfortunately, unchecking ‘prefer local metadata’ only fixed the issue for a small portion of my tracks. It did, however, cause the original Anjunadeep 14 album to pull in the added Album Artist and display correctly.
It is strange, because there are some albums this has absolutely fixed the issue for, others are still marked as individual albums for each track. Not sure what the difference is between the two permutations as there is no variation as to how I am foldering/tagging one vs. another.
Regardless, at this point it seems the only reliable option is adding “Album Artist” to every track I have, unless you have another idea?
Lastly, if that is the only solution, I really wish that clicking the “refresh all metadata” option actually refreshed the metadata, as it seemed to not pick up my addition of “Album Artist” to the track tags in my earlier testing. Without an ability to actually refresh the added tag and have it reflected in Plex, I will need to rebuild the whole library each time I go through a batch of tracks and doing this seemed to delete any playlists I created
I am not sure if this is intended behavior or not.
Did you leave “Prefer local metadata” on? If so, please post tags details for the failure. If you don’t have perfect tags (which it sounds like you don’t), many times you’ll get a better experience without it set.
yes, have “prefer local metadata” unchecked. Screenshot below, in which you can see the setting turned off and the album “All Gone Pete Tong…” which is showing as multiple albums for each track.
So further investigation on one that worked, it looks like the Album Artist did happen to be set within the file’s tag. So in this case, unchecking “prefer local metadata” may not do anything to alleviate this issue?
