It’s no longer 2001, the Compilation tag has been universally adopted everywhere now, Plex is at this point pretty much the only library manager that doesn’t support it.
Also, the COMPILATION tag exists in FLAC (Vorbis) as well, which is a format that isn’t even supported by Apple and completely outside of the Apple ecosystem. Plex also has no issues using ‘proprietary’ extensions (which is a big scare word for one simple id3 frame btw) - it happily reads Musicbrainz tags for example.
Tagging compilations with Album Artist “Various Artists” or “Diverse Künstler” or “Varios Artistas” (i,e, treat compilations as if they were a regular album by a dude called “Various Artists”) is a hack for older software that cannot handle an empty album artist field, it makes no sense to impose that workaround on software that can.
Regardless, even if Plex doesn’t support the Compilation tag, it used to correctly detect compilations before, and since .4707 it doesn’t anymore - that’s a regression.
We all know why Plex always needs a pseudo-Album Artist and has all these limitations around track artists/album artists, it’s a limitation in its database design. We’re all hoping that at some point this gets refactored, but that’s the future. At this point the scanner needs to work around the limitations and populate the database with the pseudo-artist “Various Artists”. It used to do that correctly, now it doesn’t.
