I have a very large collection of music. I use MediaMonkey to manage the file properties (metatags) for my music. I have spent a lot of time cleaning up the tags. I have the correct artist applied to every track (65k+ tracks). I have many album artists applied, but it is not a priority. I use “Various Artists” in compilation albums; HOWEVER, the artist tag is correct for all compilation tracks.
Plex is reading my metadata and placing my tag for “Artist” in the “Album Artist” tag and NOT putting my tag information for Artist in the “Artist” tag in Plex properties. Said another way, my corrected tagged file is being ignored by Plex and Plex is moving my Artist name to the Album Artist name. My playlists do not work. My music sorting aggregation is not working.
Is there a solution for this? I am including two screenshots. One is from MediaMonkey to show the correctly tagged file; the second is the Plex properties for the file and how it is different than what is defined in the filename.
It definitely looks wrong, but I think the reason they do this is because the track’s ‘Artist’ field is displayed alongside the track in the album listing. I manually added the artist’s name to the “Artist” field to illustrate:
Various Artists albums have the two fields populated correctly because ‘Album Artist’ and ‘Artist’ are different, and this allows Plex to show the individual track artists. But there’s no need to show the artist in both places when they’re the same.
The specific problem is that over 2/3s of my library shows no artist name (empty field). This is problematic when you are searching or using a tool to synchronize a playlist. I think Plex shouldn’t mess with information assigned to a specific metadata tag. It’s the equivalent as me arbitrarily decided that information typed in the first name filled should be moved to the company name if nothing exists in the company name. It’s a faulty assumption.
Well, after turning on “prefer local metatags” and then having Plex refresh all metadata, the results are the same. Plex is not using my Artist metadata for the Plex “Artist” field. They are 90% blank in Plex, while in MediaMonkey they are 100% complete.
Any other ideas? This effectively makes Plex useless as a music media library for me. I can’t find any of my music in a way that makes sense, such as show me all tracks by artist. Because all my compilation albums, which I have hundreds, say “Various Artists” most of my music is lost and can’t be searched out except by track.
