I actually have a compilation where the Album Artist is U2 and the Track Artists are each different. It shows up fine under U2. All my other compilations with Various Artist as the Album Artist and individual Track Artists work great.
FWIW.
Thanks for the input. I donāt have trouble with a comp that is tagged as one Album Artist (I have a bunch of mixtapes like the Back to Mine series like this). They show up with the tracks maintaining their individual artists. Only when āVarious Artistsā or a blank Album Artist is used does the screw-up occur. Still testing a bit.
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All of my compilation albums show up in Plex as I would expect under āVarious Artistsā They are all tagged with the album artist as āVarious Artistsā All of them seem to show track numbers, track artist, etc properly.
Unfortunately, very few have an entry at MusicBrainz, so they are unmatched. Iāve added a few to their database, but itās time consuming, and you have to wait for it to be approved before it actually becomes āMatchableā in Plex. (Takes up to 7 days)
As I mentioned earlier, though advised against it, the majority use V2.4
sorry thought that was implied in my post, yes Plex and MusicBrainz Picard use MusicBrainz database, so i was was wondering if Picard had the same issues as Plex, I would expect it would.
Fresh testing with new libraries today.
Plex Dancing the same album comp that was missing Artist tags:
- ID3 v2.4 with Album Artist āVarious Artistsā causes Artist tag to be lost
- ID3 v2.4 with blank Album Artist causes Artist tag to be lost
- ID3 v2.3 with blank Album Artist causes Artist tag to be lost
- ID3 v2.3 with Album Artist āVarious Artistsā worked
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nice, I missed that one.
interesting, because MBZ has that as a VARIOUS artist release
https://musicbrainz.org/release/b36f5115-c204-41c0-9e54-49c124aec82d
Idiots.
;^)
lol, I know you are joking, but the same can sometimes just as well apply to āplexā.
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In all seriousness, theyāre wrong. All the songs are by U2 making them the Album Artist. The songs are performed by other artists which I supposed could be stretched to make them the Track Artistā¦ but this is why I hate getting overly particular about music tagging/organizing 
I dunno, I am pretty sure that any other ācoverā compilations will also be considered āvariousā and not album artist by the original artist.
I used to be somewhat active on musicbrainz in the early days, way before I ever heard of plex, and they have a fairly regimented set of rules or policies.
But you can feel free to correct if you want and like good old fashioned wikipedia edit wars of old.
another example of a cover compilation = various (according to mbz) https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/d58d3cb1-83b0-3758-9123-52538dfeac4e
Now, donāt get me wrong, I completely agree and would also have a U2 cover compilation = U2 album artist.
As well the above KISS cover album = KISS album artist.
But you arenāt going to change mbz mind about it, I guess any more than my complaints about plex and respecting existing tags is going to change plex mind.
I feel like the Plex clients should help inform us of this? āDefunct codeā shouldnāt be usable for a new library.
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Oh believe you me, I have ZERO desire to go there 
There should also be a complete OFF switch for fingerprinting and matching.
I suspect the only OFF switch now is not having a plex pass.
With āprefer local metadataā on and the right meta tags, you can have it like that in Plex.
It has not worked like that so far.
having disabled all the extra stuff in the library options, when plex finishes re-scanning/processing I guess I will see.
also, Iād still love to see a concrete answer to this
Refresh Metadata.
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Iām confused, isnāt that exactly what I said about that U2 album?
Iām sorry, let me re-phrase.
It has not worked like that, for me.
Otherwise, my soundtrack, techno and other compilations would be showing up under āsoundtrackā, ātechnoā, etc album artists.
Thank you!
