Server Version#: 1.20.2.3402
Player Version#:
I have a large music library (230GB). Imported it to Plex. I am finding the most bizarre errors - the actual artist on a huge number of albums have been overwritten:
I have checked the metadata on the actual files, which is accurate. What the heck is Plex doing?
That Ahmed dude is really prolific, and has a wide range of musical styles!
Whatās your file and directory structure look like?
/Music
/Pink Floyd
/Wish You Were Here
01 - Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V).m4a
02 - Welcome to the Machine.mp3
03 - Have a Cigar.mp3
/Foo Fighters
/One By One
/There is Nothing Left to Lose
/U2
/Joshua Tree
I have a very careful file structure that matches Plex guidelines. Hundreds of artists/albums were imported correctly:
SOME of these messed up ones are within a folder called āVarious Artists,ā but each is in a separate folder beneath that named for the Album, as with the rest of the collection:
Meanwhile, some of these borked imports are no different from any of the correctly imported ones:
What could be going on, and how can I fix it?
Letās pick one āThe Rough Guide to Irish Folkā (just because I love Irish folk music).
Can you load that into your tag editor and screenshot that? Iād like to see at least these fields: Filename, Album Title, Track Title, Album Artist, Track Artist, Disc Number, Track Number.
This doesnāt apply to the Irish Folk album, but Iāve found that if the folder name for the album or artist doesnāt match the embedded tags, Plex may have a hard time. I would avoid naming artist folders in āLast, Firstā format. I know thatās inconvenient, but it may be an issue. You might try changing Albinoni, Tomaso to Tomaso Albinoni as an experiment.
Youāve got a great variety of music, by the way.
First, I assume your Plex Library is pointing at a āMusicā folder that contains all of the Artist folders directly? You donāt have additional levels of nesting?
Second, can you confirm that you do have some music by Ahmed Abdul-Malik? It might change the troubleshooting if you DO vs. DONāT.
Third, can you confirm you donāt have any ālooseā music files up at the top level āMusicā directory?
Fourth, is it POSSIBLE that you were editing multiple albums in Plex, and accidentally changed the Album Artist for them? Iāve NEVER done ANYTHING like that MYSELF, NO SIR.
Iām kinda grasping at straws. 
The Last/ First isnāt a problem - most of the many hundreds of albums/artists are just fine. Here is view of Rough Guide to Irish Folk in Winamp:
And re: Abdul-Malik - he is one artist in a two artist āVarious Artistsā album of Oud music.
First, I assume your Plex Library is pointing at a āMusicā folder that contains all of the Artist folders directly? You donāt have additional levels of nesting? CORRECT
Second, can you confirm that you do have some music by Ahmed Abdul-Malik? It might change the troubleshooting if you DO vs. DONāT. CORRECT
Third, can you confirm you donāt have any ālooseā music files up at the top level āMusicā directory? CORRECT
Fourth, is it POSSIBLE that you were editing multiple albums in Plex, and accidentally changed the Album Artist for them? Iāve NEVER done ANYTHING like that MYSELF, NO SIR. LOL. CORRECT
Okay, Iām starting to reach for ideas now too.
Is Plex completely configured to prefer local metadata? Itās more than just the one checkbox.
[HowTo] Configure Plex to use embedded metadata (music)
I just noticed your Plex server version. Itās a few weeks old. You might try grabbing the latest public build (1.20.4.3517).
Thanks, yes, everything is set up correctly at the server, and you can see that the Rough Guide to Irish Folk metadata is pristine. (sigh) Maybe someone else will see this and have ideas about what is going so badly wrongā¦
Sorry to be a Debbie Downer, but metadata for music in Plex is seriously broken as of a couple years ago and there doesnāt seem to be an effort to fix it. Iāve definitely tried and reported problems regarding similar artists losing cover art on other posts here with others but to no avail (see my other posts). It appears to me that the code path has some aggressive behavior that messes up anything with the same name that is actually different ā various artists is just an example of that behavior, another would be if you have a CD version and LP version of the same album ā that example wreaks havoc over time by the āmetadata processā.
In fact I have exactly the same problem with various artists but it didnāt concern me as much as the similar artists saga since I have a ton of those, so Iāve not reported this one specifically. A quick workaround would be to rename the artist back to āVarious Artistsā and see how long that sticks. That is exactly what I did today in fact when I noticed the problem had returned for my various artists which were all renamed by Plex to āKorda Artistsā. A background process runs every few days which refreshes the meta-data and reverts to these bugs unfortunately although itās not really predictable ā things might be fine for a week or two then suddenly get messed up again. It is possible to turn off the metadata process but now Iām heading towards the weeds and ultimately, I turned that process back on or an update did.
My advice is to do the best you can to help convince Plex to to seriously look at the metadata process for music. Meanwhile, given that itās been about 2 years of this Iām taking a seriously look at Roon now. I used to love Plex when the metadata worked 
I wonder if this has something to do with āOud Vibrationsā not being present as a release on Plexās primary source for matching, Musicbrainz. They list each of the individual artistsā albums which comprise this release, but not the collection. That being the case, Plex may be throwing these tracks into the larger pool for matching, which may itself cause Abdul-Malik to be shown as an album artist for others.
Whatās the behavior if you move that album out of your library path and re-scan/refresh metadata for the library? Does it correct the matching, or does it then pick another artist as āit?ā
Yeah, I am starting now to get angry at Plex. The more I dig it seems that ANY album with more than one artist prompts Plex to arbitrarily grab a different artist and slap it on the whole album. All my settings are correct, given the options. The server is just behaving inappropriately. AND when I have it refresh the library, it isnāt even recognizing changes I am making to the metadata in various files, although they are clearly and correctly visible in WinAmp and Win 10 File Explorer. This is really lousy coding by Plex. I am very disappointed.
If youāre interested, you could try a different troubleshooting approach. Create a new top-level music directory outside of your current music path. Copy one of your problematic albums to that new location, so that you end up with something like this:
New Music Library\
Various Artists\
The Rough Guide to Irish Folk\
...
Create a completely new test music library and add the newly-created directory (āNew Music Libraryā in this example) to it, and otherwise configure it identically to your existing music library.
Does it correctly match as Various Artists with the correct album and tracks? If not, we can take a deeper dive on what specifically Plex doesnāt like about it. If it does match correctly, what happens if you add an album with a single artist/album artist to the new library? Figuring out when it breaks might provide some clues as to whatās tripping it up.
Been there. What helps is adding the metadata on the music file. Use Musicbrainz Picard to make sure all the files are correct before adding to Plex. Under the lockdown, Iāve converted all my CDs to FLAC - it really does sound better - and ran into issues similar to you. The less obscure stuff had no issues, but my Hawaiian music was not matching very well. Worse case, you could always add your info to the MusicBrainz DB to share, but if itās not available you can select āPersonal Media Artistā which should use the metadata from what the music file has.
Winamp might be an issue there. In flac files, Winamp uses a different spelling of the āAlbum Artistā Vorbis tag than the majority of other software.
The result is, that Plex will behave as if the album artist had not been set at all.
And if you have more than one track artist within the same album, Plex will then default this album to Various Artists.
And if you happen to have such an album stored underneath the same Artist folder as an album which does have correct Album Artist meta tags, all your Various Artists albums might get incorrectly attributed to the tagged album artist.
I recommend you to check and revise your meta tags with Mp3tag - the universal Tag Editor (ID3v2, MP4, OGG, FLAC, ...)
instead of Winamp.
Thank you all for the informed, thoughtful responses. I have properly updated the metadata on many of my Various Artists albums, some using WinAmp and some using MP3tag. Then I had the Plex server (updated to most recent version) do a full metadata refresh, making sure local metadata was preferred. Yet still a huge number of albums are tagged incorrectly and often incomprehensibly. I have liked using Plex for video. But for a large music library it is deeply disappointing.
My metadata is tagged properly and works perfect in JRiver which I use for other purposes. Plus the SAME files and file structure worked perfectly in Plex before about 18 months ago when something got broken in the matching logic and has never been fixed.
So, despite good intentions, these efforts to tag, retag, āPlex danceā, etcā¦ are all rabbit holes that go nowhere. In fact, things will look good for a few days or a week then start to get messed up again by the background metadata process.
Plex please review these problems! The matching engine simply is buggy for various artists and similarly named albums, such as the same album in two different libraries, or slight variations of the same album.
At any given time about 5% of my cover art is missing because I have so many different versions of the same albums in my library. That number is 0% for JRiver based on exactly the same files.
Before these problems began I was a massive fan of Plex for music, it worked perfectly. I didnāt change my files or anything ā the software changed and the problems began for me.
At some point there was a release that reworked the matching logic and the bugs werenāt readily apparent at the time but each few days of the matching process running behind the scenes messes up the Plex metadata database ā at least this is what I, and others on the missing cover art posts, have been experiencing.
FYI: another user created a fresh new post on the related topic of missing cover art for similarly named albums:
So I have done more investigating and more metatag tidying, and itās clear that Plexās handling of music files is broken, just broken. Another example: I have the 10 disc collection of Richard Goode performing all the Beethoven piano sonatas, with all the metatags are correct, consistent, and created identically.
Nevertheless, Plex recognizes just six of the discs. The other four discs simply donāt exist in Plex, not under any name - Beethoven, sonata, Goode, nothing. I KNOW the files are fine and recognizable, though, because in FOLDER view, all 10 discs appear. So why donāt those similarly tagged four discs appear in any other view?
This is amateurish and infuriating, and also incomprehensible - how could any decent software behave so inconsistently?. How do we get the attention of anyone at Plex to press them to fix this mess?
I like the idea of making a second Music library and putting just those Beethoven sonatas in it. It would be informative.
Is there any official path to report these problems / bugs or is this it? Do we simply wait until someone from Plex looks at this topic and takes it seriously?
Iām unclear how bug reporting / fixing works with Plex. I had assumed that this was the official channel but the other thread was around for a long time and never got any real attention.
