While similar problems to this have been reported before, I can’t find anything that matches my specific configuration.
I’ve recently imported my entire legacy music library from iTunes to Plex, and for the most part it’s gone well, using the embedded metadata that I’ve carefully curated over the years. However, there are a few cases where it’s just taken a single artist image and bio and applied it across multiple artists…
The problem seems to be connected with compilation and “Various Artists” albums, but it seems that the real issue is that Plex isn’t necessarily handling the “Artist” and “Album Artist” tags properly, and it’s putting too much emphasis on the “Album” tag.
What appears to be happening is that if the “Album Artist” tag hasn’t been filled in, Plex assigns each track artist to be the “Album Artist,” which essentially creates one instance of the album for each artist. While I don’t necessarily see this as a bug, I do think it would be good if Plex could dynamically recognize a “Various Artists” album when it sees one.
However, for some oddball reason Plex seems to be assuming for metadata purposes that because all of the artists share the same album name, they must actually BE the same artist, and assigns a single artist photo and a single artist bio to all of them (and not even the same one — as you can see from the example above, the photo is Harry Connick Jr, and the bio is Boyz II Men).
However, to make matters worse, even after I manually corrected the data for this album (in Plex) by assigning “Various Artists” as the album artist and copying each artist back into the “Artist” field (IMHO, Plex also shouldn’t have left this field blank, since it was populated in the original track metadata), Plex does not seem to be making any effort to fix the issue, no matter how many times I rescan or refresh metadata. Further, Plex isn’t reading the actual file structure, presumably because I’ve set it to use embedded tags, so even doing the Plex Dance causes the same problem all over again unless I go through and edit the tags for the original items, which really shouldn’t be necessary in this case.
