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.)
- The folder structure that holds your files should better follow the same structure that is defined by the previous 2 points. https://support.plex.tv/articles/200265296-adding-music-media-from-folders/
- 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.jpgfile 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)
