In Plexamp my “Various Artists” album show up in “Album” (203 albums) and some in “Compilations” (116 Albums).
In ID3 tag I have “Various Artists” as Album Artist on all albums.
I have read here that folder structure should be:
/Music
/Various Artists
/Guardians Of The Galaxy - Awesome Mix Vol. 1
01 - Hooked On A Feeling.mp3
02 - Go All The Way.mp3
03 - Spirit In The Sky.mp3
Under “Various Artists” folder, I would like to have one folder for POP, one for ROCK and so on.
Can I use this:
I understand the drive to organize things the way you like at the folder level, but the best way to be happy with Plex for music is to give up and follow Plex’s rules for folder structure. If your files are tagged properly, you can tell Plex, “show me rock” or “show me pop” and meet your organizational goals in a different way.
You could have separate collections per genre like @TeknoJunky pointed out but that seems like over-organizing. Metadata will let you keep track of things, no need to divide all the files into so many separate areas.
Yeah, like they said. You’re fighting against a losing game. You can have better results if you let go of the persistence of how you have it. With a large music collection of 150,000 tracks, you won’t like how your own folder structure is setup because it then becomes a nightmare to organize.
you can always organize how you want, then fight with plex and do fix match whenever it loses track again.
You are not the only one who hates plex’s dependence on file organization, it should just work by reading tags, the file system organization should be completely irrelevant… if one wants to dump all files into a single folder, or if they want to organize by their own custom organization, plex should just respect it.
In eg: Tag&Rename there is a tag field “Part of a compilation” that should be ticked for all tracks in a compilation album.
BTW I don’t set ‘album artist’ = “Various Artists”, rather use a grouping or genre for similar albums eg: “Comp 70’s” has library root at:- "M:\music\comp"
tracks at:- M:\music\comp\Comp 70S\Sounds Of The Seventies 1970\The Hollies - He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.flac
I also use 18 music libraries to separate my music, roughly separated by genre, no way I would put them all in one library. eg I have a separate library called ‘live’ for live albums and ‘other’ for best of/re-releases as I only want original studio albums in the main genre libraries (alt, classical, elec, rock, pop, unpop, comp, other, amateur etc)
I also only use offline metadata in nfo’s but that’s another story.
Plex takes the “compilation” info from two sources:
when the album is matched against the online MusicBrainz database
if the word “compilation” appears in the embedded tag RELEASETYPE (FLAC) or TXXX:MusicBrainz Album Type (mp3), so for example if the tag is album;compilation
Fighting against Plex’s need for specific filename and folder name structures is indeed futile, it is what it is.
I think all media front ends use some sort of a predefined folder structure, I inherited mine from Kodi and it works fine and makes sense (library\artist\album\track.mp3). As I said I use nfo’s and don’t use any of Plex’s online meta agents so maybe my experience is different.
