I have read a lot of posts regarding this issue but couldn’t get it to work.
However, here is what I had in my library:
Many of them grouped into a single album and some didn’t. They are all in the same metadata configurations.
I am confused here.
They all have “Compilation” turned on or set to “1”. Depends on what editor you view with. And Plex ignore this setting, I heard you.
None of them has any value in “Album Artists”.
All the “track artists” are different and Plex recognized them and put them into “Various Artists”.
The part I am confused is why many of them were group into albums and some others won’t.
I couldn’t figure out the inconsistency behavior.
I couldn’t get those non-grouped albums to group together no matter what values I put in the “Various Artists”.
Not sure what you mean by “ungrouped albums”?!
Mind sharing some screenshot / specific example?
Usually albums are identified by their name (obviously) and the name of the album artist – this way you can have different “Greatest Hits” albums for different artists. I guess the best way to achieve that is to actually set an album artist as “Various Artists”.
I had the same behavior…with many various artists “best of 80s” type albums. Some custom made I made and others based on actual released compilations albums.
The only pattern I have noticed is when I added one of these albums is if Plex was able to match the album to an actual release, it calls it a compilation…and any of my ‘custom’ albums/groupings of VA songs are listed as albums. Many of my VA albums are movie soundtracks, and those are listed as sooundtracks. Honestly, my Various Artists radio/shuffle is one of my favorite PlexAmp listens. Hope this helps.
Quick Tip for you now that COLLECTIONS have made their way into the Music Library on the album level. What I have done with some Various Artists albums is group them as a Collection for instance:
Disney Musicals
DIsney Classics
Harry Potter
If you name these album Collections to match the same Movie Collections that in your Movie Library, they all show up as related media.
I also do this to group any best of compilations based on decades that I personally prefer over what Plex Decade Radio gives me.
Totally didn’t realize that was possible. Thanks. I’m always learning what else has been added.
On this note of using Collections… is there a plan to bring Collections to the Playlist level as well?
I definitely feel like I’ll have more than 300 playlists as the years go by and would like to see Collections capability added to clean up that area as well.
Nothing that I’m aware of (which doesn’t mean much).
There’s a feature suggestion to allow organizing playlists into folders (kind like you can do in iTunes)
To follow up on this, I think what the original poster was saying is this (which I’m seeing):
When viewing your library on Album view (not Artist view), some “Various Artists” albums show up as a single album, some show up as one album per track, even though they’re all a single album.
For example, Album A is in the list once; I click on it, and I get all the tracks from that album, each with a different artist.
Album B is in the list 12 times; I click on the first entry, and there’s a single track with an artist listed. Second entry also has a single track with artist. There’s one album entry for each track on that album, even though everything matches as far as album.
Plex seems to have identified this as an album – it pulls the artwork in properly – yet it doesn’t group them together as a single entity in the album list.
