Plex doesn't correctly add Various Artists albums

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Server Version#: 1.30.0.6406
Player Version#: Not relevant

Using the Plex Music agent, Plex does not add new Various Artists albums to musicbrainz’s “add compilations to this artist” Various Artists. It adds them to a Various Artists, but I’m not sure which one and it’s definitely not the right one - they sit resolutely separate from all my other VA albums until I Fix Match and choose the “actta” VA option. Then it moves them to the correct Artist, but it also initiates a Refresh Metadata on every album in Various Artists, which takes a considerable amount of time and uses resources unduly…

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Is your library configured to prefer local metadata? If so, make sure the albumartist tag in every file is explicitly “Various Artists”.

If you are tagging your music, you can also add the Release MBID as a tag to your files. Some tagging apps, including Picard and Puddletag (a linux app), can do this. Plex will recognize the tag, and should be much better at matching your albums.

If you’re not using “Prefer local metadata,” it’s very important that you’re using the folder/filename structure that Plex requires to correctly identify your media.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200265296-adding-music-media-from-folders/

3

Thanks for the thoughts. I am not using Prefer Local Metadata, and my music is both correctly organised, and tagged - this is not my first rodeo.

I use beets to tag (in the main), and here is an excerpt of one of the files that was misplaced by Plex today:

    comment[43]: MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID=89ad4ac3-39f7-470e-963a-56509c546377
    comment[44]: MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID=7d53135b-36bb-407b-ba60-6fc6755e7a6d
    comment[45]: MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID=f52dcbc1-6b9c-4c1e-a7cd-a56a8ec2fb74
    comment[46]: MUSICBRAINZ_RELEASEGROUPID=6a0a9f53-75b7-4bf5-8e47-de69989cfa7d
    comment[47]: MUSICBRAINZ_RELEASETRACKID=6f38785b-bbca-4c7c-86c9-e24ad1568d3e
    comment[48]: MUSICBRAINZ_TRACKID=4fee2800-6c34-4a7a-ba94-ccbbb7dea6d5
    comment[49]: MUSICBRAINZ_WORKID=4d097480-5d36-45c8-a059-43f63649952b

The id is correct for the correct Various Artists (89ad4ac3-39f7-470e-963a-56509c546377), yet Plex still mismatched it. Weirdly, it pulls metadata from its match, the correct metadata and feels it is “matched” - it’s just filed under a different “Various Artists” in the interface. I wonder, when it happens again, whether there is a way of seeing which artist Plex thinks it’s matched with?

4

I don’t think there’s anyplace in the UI to check that. You might have a look in the logs. My guess would be the Plex Media Scanner Matcher.log, but I’m not an expert on the log files.

5

I now have an intuition as to what may be going on, and I think it might be to do with Localisation. The reason I suggest this is because I see analogous behaviour when adding some Japanese artists. The one who most consistently fails in a similar way is Mika Nakashima | 中島美嘉.

If I search for either the romaji or the kanji in musicbrainz, I am brought to the same artist record: f8d6e5df-069e-4b8d-9a13-cc7e0a558dd1 - there are no independent entries for the romaji and kanji artist names - that’s what Aliases are for.

Within my music collection I prefer my artists to be named as per their native language, but when I add an album by Mika, it is added to an artist whose “Artist” field is the romaji version. It matches the album correctly. I then do a Fix Match on that Artist and put in the kanji and it finds a 100% match and combines with the existing kanji record I have in my system.

So I think, in this case, Plex is using the English (Primary) alias because my system is localised in English. I think this is fine, it’s how it should be. If I choose to override that by editing the Artist field, that’s on me.

But in the case of Various Artists - there are many other languages who use the English language Alias “Various Artists” as their primary localisation and so I postulate:

a) Plex differentiates between Aliases when it should not, and
b) Somewhere down the line either my main Various Artists entry has become attached to a different localisation’s Alias (although whenever I fix the match, I choose the only offered option), or
c) When matching new Various Artists albums, Plex is picking the wrong localisation for the Various Artists, and because of (a), is creating a new artist when it shouldn’t.

Any developers care to suggest whether this is on the right track?

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