Server Version#: 1.23.3.4707
Player Version#: N/A
I just upgraded to 1.23.3.4707 and Plex is no longer processing Albums with Various Artists anymore. Instead, it is creating a new Album with each Track Artist being the Album Artist…
I have 100+ new albums for what should just be 3 albums…
Did you activate “Prefer local metadata”?
Are your files tagged with “Album Artist” meta tags?
The Album Artist has the same field as as the Album itself.
“Prefer local metadata” is checked for the Music Library.
I’m not sure what you are saying.
Do all files within any particular folder have an identical content in their “Album Artist” meta tags?
Do they have “Album Artist” meta tags at all and not just simple “Artist” tags?
Sorry, for clarity the text in the Album field is the same as the Album Artist field.
e.g. “…July 2021 Album”
Unless I am misunderstanding you completely, you are not tagging your albums correctly.
The “Album” tag contains the title of the album.
Its content must be identical in all tracks of a particular album.
The “Album Artist” meta tag contains the name of the artist which is featured on the whole album.
Its content, too must be identical in all tracks of a particular album.
In the special case of a “sampler”-style album, where every track is made by a different artist, the name of the “Album Artist” is usually Various Artists.
While the regular “Artist” tag contains the name of the artist who created this particular track.
The Album and Album Artist fields for all of the tracks are all identical and set to the Album name. I believe that naming scheme meets the criteria you specified.
e.g.
Album: “…July 2021 Album”
Album Artist: e.g. “…July 2021 Album”
Importing these has worked flawlessly since I started them back in 2018.
That doesn’t make sense. The Album Title is completely different from the Album Artist.
If you wanted to keep that, you’d have to create a separate artist folder for every “Album Artist” – and therefore for every single album.
Remember:
/Music
/AlbumArtist <-- appears in Plex when switching to the "Artists" library view
/AlbumTitle
01 - Track Title.mp3
02 - Track Title.mp3
03 - Track Title.mp3
...
This folder structure applies to sampler albums as well!
HIi @OttoKerner,
It makes sense to me. There is never an Album Artist.
That’s how the music is distributed to me by my music service and imported on a daily basis and I cannot change it. As I said, just importing these has worked perfectly fine up until now.
That’s why the “artist” name Various Artists exists.
Just use it for sampler-style albums.
Or if you must categorize a bit, then use several different album artists – whatever makes sense to you.
But you must create an artist folder for every different album artist and put only files into it which are tagged with the same album artist.
Otherwise all the albums will fracture apart.
Plex would automatically place “Various Artists” into the Album Artist field for me… But it seems to have stopped doing that with this release.
Right, but I had not changed that setting before updating. Is it enabled by default now? I have not made any changes to my Library settings so this seems like a bug to me…
It seems Plex had a pretty drastic update in it’s Media Scanner. See these two recent posts for similar issues (first is my own).
It was guessed to be caused by:
- (Music) If a single directory appears to have multiple albums, match them all.
Pretty much that single change made it so that unless your various artist style albums (aka multiple artists for a single album) are meticulously tagged, in appropriate folders and you have prefer local meta data turned on… Plex is just going to blow out single albums with multiple artists into the same album for each artist. Manually trying to correct this in Plex completely unmatches albums and breaks everything (which used to be possible).
I REALLY wish this feature was included behind a feature flag on the library. I would NEVER have a use case of having multiple albums in a single album directory (that’s insane to me), but there are PLENTY of use cases where you have various artist style albums. To me it seems like a change that fixes some 1% scenario and breaks a bunch of other ones (my own personal take, who knows how common multiple albums in a single album folder are).
Good luck!
I think you are right and appreciate the clarification.
@OttoKerner can we revert this change or make it an option? It’s a non-negotiable for me and it doesn’t really make sense.
It was put in at the request of a lot of users, so I don’t think so.
Got links?
I forgot to point out that @OttoKerner 's suggestion is impossible in my case since I’m indexing 10-20 Releases categorized year and month and in my case, that means that I need to now nest every album within a folder with the same name. I’m getting 200-500 tracks per week across 20 “albums” and this change has created a monumental lift in effort…
I would need to do this:
Music Release 2021 Week 1\Music Release 2021 Week 1\Artist - Track.
Why this change was not added as an option is beyond me…
Excuse my ignorance but where do you find this option in the settings?.
It exists in the properties of your music library. But only, if you use “Plex Music” for both Scanner and Agent.
