I am trying to troubleshoot why Plex does not consistently sort my albums by “Album Artist Sort Order” as tagged in Picard. For instance, I have John Coltrane albums that are sorted under “J”, and John Coltrane albums that are sorted under “C” in the All/Albums/ByAlbumArtist" view. All those albums have an Album Artist of “John Coltrane”, and an Album Artist Sort Order of “Coltrane, John”, no exceptions.
I am using local metadata only; I’m managing my files according to the recommended file structure.
Additional observations:
Plex also seems to have created two entries for the artist “John Coltrane,” one that includes a bio, and one that doesn’t.
I also noticed that “Album Artist” is absent from my metadata edit screen in Plex, whereas I see many screenshots on this forum that show that it should display there, and be editable.
Plex also routinely splits albums for which I have updated the metadata in two, and I have to manually merge them.
I am at present updating all the metadata for my files by running items through Picard, and in that process, I am making sure that sort tags are consistently present. However, my library does not always consistently incorporate those changes in metadata, even if I hit “refresh metadata.”
Album Artist is a property of the album. Therefore you will only see it when editing the album, not the track.
Artist records in the Plex database are created when the Plex server is scanning an album for the first time which has that album artist.
Depending on whether you had “Prefer local metadata” enabled at this time, it might either take the artist name and it’s sorting name from the embedded meta tags of that album, or from Musicbrainz.
Subsequently added albums by the same album artist will not be able to change the properties of the album artist in the Plex database anymore, no matter what meta tags they have embedded.
Also, changing the embedded meta tags of that initial album won’t change the Album Artist properties in the Plex database retroactively.
You should be able to “merge” two different album artists in Plex. Mark the one with the correct metadata first, then the incorrect one and trigger the merge command.
Put your music library into the Artist view mode to do this.
Thank you so much, Otto! What you’ve shared has really helped me enormously.
One last question: I already have my Plex Library established; and I am going through and now updating metadata, much of it originally created in iTunes, with Picard. Given what you’ve said, it sounds like I might be better off deleting and reestablishing the entire library when I’m done with my clean-up project. Otherwise, I’ll have to do a lot of manual clean-up of the “sort album artist,” and merging artists that are currently separated. (Which I now know how to do, which is very handy!)
Do you agree? Reestablish the library once I’m done with clean-up? I have 1,400 albums, so knowing the most expedient way to do things will matter!
That wholly depends on how many of those albums exhibit issues.
If it’s a significant portion, go ahead and scrap the whole library.
Be aware however, that recreating the library from scratch means also all the analysations that Plex server can do need to be repeated as well.
This can mean days or even weeks without e.g. sonic analysis, which to me is significant.
Further fundamental things that apply to music in Plex:
all tracks within the same album must be tagged with the same AlbumArtist. Do note that AlbumArtist and Artist are different things. The Artist tag can deviate on each track.
There can be only one name mentioned in the AlbumArtist tag. If you have a collaboration album, decide on which artist you want this album be mainly credited to, then put only that name into the AlbumArtist tag. The regular Artist tag can hold all collaborators, if desired. (Putting more than one artist in can work sometimes, but don’t take it for granted. In the cases where it doesn’t work, you may find yourself back in the initial situation that started this thread.)
Sampler albums/compilations are usually credited to the AlbumArtist named “Various Artists”
Avoid embedding insanely large album art into your audio files. If you are a friend of high quality covers, put a cover.jpg file in high resolution into the album folder.
Plex cannot read meta tags from wav, aiff, dts, ac3, mka files. All metadata you see for these in Plex was either gleaned from their folder structure and file names, or is supplemented from Musicbrainz (if the server was able to identify the album)
For lossless music storage I highly recommend flac. (use alac only if you have primarily Apple hardware as clients)
