I have so much music. A great deal are collections and compilations of sorts with various artists all playing on the same album, sometimes multiple contributing artists on the same track. WMP had this organization concept down. I could search by either, but primarily, browsing my library, I find whole albums under the album artist, be it the host artist or just “Various Artists.”
Migrating over to Plex, I notice when I look at my music that these albums have been fragmented, so there’s an instance of that album specific to each Contributing artist. There doesn’t appear to be a way to see all the tracks in one natural list. Is Plex supposed to be ignoring my album artist field?
Your metadata isn’t set properly. Plex doesn’t have any concept of contributing artists. It only has one artist per song and it reads that from the Album Artist field. So if your songs get fragmented, your Album Artist field is set to the contributing artist rather than the album artist… And because plex music handling is currently broken beyond belief (and they have seemingly no intention of fixing it since it’s been broken for over 4 years now), you have to move the media out of your plex indexed folder, update the library so the references gets removed, edit the local data (yes, you really have to edit the local data, it’s THAT broken), now you can move them back in, and update again. This will make the scanner pick up the new data, which you can then let your agents fill with some more. Any changes you make with the media while added to Plex, well Plex simply ignores it and overwrites it the next time it refreshes.
3 Likes
Ugh, I remember dealing with a select few movie files like this before I understood Plex naming conventions. What a headache.
Will I end up having to do the same thing when I change media source folder names to reflect the proper artist or album name, or can I just delete the media from my Plex library and have Plex import it as if it were brand new media?
Thanks!
Edit: I’m just realizing that these two solutions are actually the same. I was mistaken by thinking there was a way to remove media from Plex (without deleting the source media). Ah well, luckily I don’t have too many of these albums to change! I’ll go through moving files out, updating to remove records, and re-add with the proper metadata. I’ve been using mp3tag for this by the way. It sure simplifies bulk modifications!
1 Like
Ah ok. So not just me then? What a pain in the ■■■■; and this is STILL a thing in August 2018. WTH PLEX?! Just give us the album artist and contributing artists fields in the PLEX Media Manager. Why shouldI have to do EtherMan’s steps, using Winamp to rename (I prefer it ok) and then import back. #whatapain
1 Like
