Plex changing artist to "Various Artists" (when Library folders overlap)

[Batwam]

Server Version#: 1.43.0.10492
Player Version#:

Hello, I have noticed that Plex overwrites the artist name for some of my files to Various Artists even though the metadata is fully populated.

I have my Plex music content set into 2 folders:

~/Music for full albums organised as artist/album/song.mp3

~Music2 for partial albums, also organised as artist/album/song.mp3

for example with this song, I have
```

Band                            : Sadie Jean
Title                           : Somebody's Everything
Year                            : 2025
Artist                          : Sadie Jean

other files are populated the same way, using the same tool and work fine. What appears to be happening is that if the same artist exists in ~/Music, the files in ~/Music2 will be assumed to be “Various Artists” for some reason. I also changed my settings to prefer local metadata but that didn’t make any difference.

Note that if I take the album and move it from ~/Music2 to ~/Music then it works perfectly and the artist is not correctly populated… Also, Navidrome has no problem correctly categorising these files but I like Plexamp and I paid for a lifetime pass so I’d like to fix my Plex setup if possible…

Would anyone have a suggestion on how to fix this (which doesn’t involve merging the two folders as I don’t want my main library to have partial albums)?

[BanzaiInstitute]

I don’t think there is a way to fix this but I am following to see if I am wrong.

[Batwam]

I tried to move the second folder into the first one ~/Music/Music2 but that didn’t help… I don’t understand why it’s so hard so simply use the metadata in the files… we should be able to dump every file in a big folder and seem them neatly arranged by album based on the metadata!

[boydfields]

Agreed! Tags must take priority when set to 'Prefer local metadata’.

[swinning]

I fixed this by sorting my library by artists, and editing all the artists listed as ‘Various Artists’ clicking on the edit pencil in bottom left of their picture and entering the correct Artist and Sort Artist by removing the Various Artists from both of these fields, click Save Changes and albums should appear correctly.