Plex Music Scanner behaving strangely w "ALBUMARTIST" tag

[jademonkee]

Server Version#: 1.21.3.4046
Player Version#: NA

Hi there,
Been loving the new Plex music experience - so much so that I have now shutdown my Subsonic server and am using Plex exclusively for listening to music on the go (PlexAmp is so good I sometimes just start crying when I pick up my phone).
However, I come from the Logitech Media Server world for home streaming, and over the 10 years of using that product, I’ve become accustomed to certain metadata rules, and the tags in my collection reflect that (my collection is excellently tagged - all tracks have at least artist, albumartist, title, year, genre, replaygain, and most also include record label, descriptions (as ‘unsynced lyrics’ tags), and some other useful stuff.
I was expecting Plex to then just ‘pick up’ what I was feeding it with no drama.
However, there seems to be a fairly considerable difference in the way that “albumartist” is treated.
I have used “albumartist” as a way to group podcasts or other album series (such as “FACT Mix” or “DJ-Kicks” series). In the case of FACT Mixes, the “albumartist” is tagged as “FACT Mix” and the track artist (they are single track DJ Mixes) is the name of the DJ. Similarly, with the DJ-Kicks series of compilations (which are a series of individual album tracks by different artists mixed together to form a continuous - but segmented - DJ Mix) I have each album tagged with “DJ Kicks” AND the mix artist name (eg “Tiga”) as two “albumartist” tags, and then each individual track artist as “artist” on each track.
This means that if I am keen to listen to a FACT Mix, I can browse to the FACT Mix album artist, and see every single one available. Alternatively, however, if I’m in the mood to listen to some Tiga, I browse to his name in the Album Artist list, and there are not only his albums, but also his FACT Mix, and his DJ-Kicks entry. Neat. This is good. I like this.
HOWEVER.
On Plex, something wacky has happened:
If I search for “FACT” in the search bar (see below) it shows “FACT Mixes” as countless individual artists, each with one album.

When I browse to one (see below) it shows the metadata for the artist that did the mix, but still lists them as “FACT Mix” rather than (in the example of the image) Move D.

You can also see in the first image that albums that aren’t FACT Mixes have also incorrectly been labelled as FACT Mixes, because the artist that does the album (in the case of “Find The Cow” it’s Aardvarck) also has a FACT Mix. Worse yet, if I search for Aardvarck, the only result I get is his FACT Mix (as his name is in the title) - he doesn’t even appear as an available artist (see image), and his “Find The Cow” album isn’t returned in search results.

With over 500 FACT Mixes from over 500 artists on my server, it makes finding a particular album sometimes quite difficult.
How can this be fixed? Is it a setting on my end, or a bug on yours?
Can you help? I can provide logs and feedback and am willing to try and debug and/or test any changes. Please help.
Thanks and regards.

[jademonkee]

Nobody? Is there anyone from Plex Support that is looking for feedback on the music scanner? This seems like a pretty major problem to me.
How can I direct feedback to that team?

[certuna]

Yes, there are bugs with the scanner setting the wrong album artist, I don’t know if the devs are working on it, but there’s a number of topics on this already.

I have used “albumartist” as a way to group podcasts or other album series

However, this is the main cause of the issue, in Plex the Album Artist isn’t used that way. And in Plex’s internal database “track artist” is not an indexed field so these mixes will never end up listed under the actual DJ, for that to happen the DJ name has to be the Album Artist.

Plex has a fairly illogical database structure for music that causes a number of limitations/strange behaviour like this (search results etc), from what I can see there is probably not an easy fix without also having to re-write a lot of client code downstream. Which I imagine the developers aren’t too keen on.

[jademonkee]

That’s so disappointing to hear. I was hoping that Plex could become a primary source for my music consumption, but this is an insurmountable hurdle for me - there needs to be a differentiation between album artist and track artist (indeed, it’s expected behaviour, otherwise separate ‘album artist’ and ‘track artist’ tags wouldn’t be standard!)
Really hope that they see the light and read music metadata in a way that most people have built their music collections around.

[certuna]

I assume they know full well what the issue is (it’s been like this for ten years), but it’s just too hard to fix without breaking lots of existing code. If we ever move to a Plex Media Server 2.0, a new API and new client apps, I guess that’s the time where they will do something like this.

If you look at the Kodi database you can see how they did it - their database structure is set up to handle this stuff well. All the “role” fields (Album Artist, Track Artist, Composer, Remixer, Conductor, Producer, Oboe Player, etc) can all link back to the same artist index. In other words, in the Kodi world you can click on the artist name, and see all his credits: the albums where he is album artist, the songs where he is track artist, the songs where he is producer, where he is oboe player. Too bad Kodi is just a player, not a streaming server - it has the perfect foundations for it.