Plex inaccurately updating music artist tags

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Server Version#: 1.40.0.7775
Player Version#: Plexamp 4.9.5

I’m not sure when this started but if I noticed in my music library that Plex updates the artist information incorrectly after it sees an album that includes “& Other Artist”. It likely occurs with when an artist has a variation of their name also, but if so I haven’t noticed yet.

Example: I have an artist in my music library “Some Band” that has 10 albums all tagged correctly with the artist as “Some Band”. But then they release another album made in collaboration with someone, so the album artist is instead “Some Band & Other Guy”. Instead of just tagging just the one album with “Some Band & Other Guy”, it will then rename the artist of “Some Band” to that for everything in the library, regardless of existing local tags. Not sure where the Plex music agent is pulling metadata from but that may be inaccurate, at least when I look on places like Discogs and MusicBrainz.

In my settings I have Prefer local metadata enabled, but Plex seems to be ignoring that and instead updating it on its own. I also have Scanner and Agent set to Plex Music, I’m not sure if setting Agent to Personal Media Artists would help or what the implications of that are?

Either way, I would think that with Prefer local metadata enabled Plex should be reading the tags that are present in the media files (where both albums have the correct artist) instead of fetching its own metadata.

I get that Plex wants to tie these albums together since they have the same artist in common, so it would also be better if Plex set the artist for each album independently, and then perhaps tied them together via the Sort Artist field instead, and ideally be able to account for multiple artists per album.

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I think Plex cannot handle albums with different album artists within the same folder so if you set the album artist to “Some Band” for all and then for those specific albums set the artist to “Some Band & Other Guy” it should work

1 Like
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Yeah I think you’re right, I think for it to go in and stick I also have to lock the artist name for both of them. It would be really nice to be able to lock the artist name in the album metadata to avoid the extra step.

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Don’t consider locking anything, this won’t do you any good.
It will just make the overall behavior much less logical and harder to understand.

I think what you should do is

  1. ensure that the server’s primary database file is not damaged
  2. re-organise your files and ensure they are both in a hierarchical folder structure and have proper embedded meta tags. Refresh of library is not picking up changed file metadata - #2 by OttoKerner
  3. don’t try to mix several artists as the “album artist” of one album. Plex has no support for this, at all. If you try it, chaos will ensue. You will have to decide on one album artist per a certain album. You can however put a deviating artist into the regular artist meta tag. (artist <> album artist). Then movie this album into the folder structure as mentioned above in 2)
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