Apologies if this has been answered in this thread before already, and feel free to point to in the proper direction if it has and you know but -
Does Plexamp no longer group albums by the ‘album artist’ tag? I meticulously tag all my music with MusicBrainz and ensure featured artists are moved to the song title tag, and that album artists are all consistent. I also use the ‘prefer local metadata’ option.
However lately Plex/Plexamp are splitting artists by a single album artists based on the ‘artists’ tag - I am fairly certain this is new, unless my MusicBrainz settings changed erroneously. It’s very frustrating because the only way I know to fix it is to open the main Plex app, find the albums and manually merge them into the one they are supposed to be.
If all else fails I suppose I’ll go through everything and remove the artists tags, but if I can avoid that time sink that would be fantastic.
The album artist for all tracks is ‘Apollo Brown & Guilty Simpson’, and the album title for all tracks is ‘Dice Game’. Yet Plex puts tracks 6 and 14 in a duplicated Dice Game album entry by themselves. Those two tracks have an ‘artists’ tag with the featured artist included in a string list separated by semicolons. The remaining tracks which group into a separate album in Plex all have identical ‘artists’ tags with ‘Apollo Brown; Guilty Simpson’.
Is it possible that Plex doesn’t merge erroneously split albums when changing the library settings from Prefer Local Metadata off to Prefer Local Metadata on?
I found another album where there are no tag differences on any of the tracks, yet Plex still has one track split off into its own album entry. Refreshing metadata on those two releases did update the date of the duplicated album entry, but it did not merge it with the other entry.
There is always the “Merge” action which you can use on at least two albums together.
Or you can perform the Plex Dance “light” (i.e. without step 4) on the affected albums.
Ah, bummer. Okay - that must be what happened, assuming the affected albums were scanned when initially imported, before updating the library settings.
Thank you for the confirmation! Regarding the Plex Dance, I assume I will lose my listening stats if doing this?
Also, are there any additional details around the design decisions for this? My expectation is that Plex would simply follow the metadata when that option is on, but this seems like unexpected behavior and contradicts the setting.
There is nothing simple about this. If Plex were to simply follow the metadata, it could revert manual merges or splits (both on the “artist” and “release” levels) made by the server owner in one fell swoop.
I’m sorry to keep bumping this, but there is most definitely something wrong with the Prefer Local Metadata option.
Today I added a new album by Marie Davidson, City of Clowns, and Plex has erroneously grouped it in with a different artist, “Marie Davidson & L’Œil Nu” where Plex has previously erroneously grouped Marie Davidson’s other albums.
Why is this happening? I have Prefer Local Metadata turned on, and it was turned on when adding City of Clowns.
I will reiterate, ‘Prefer Local Data’ should always group albums based on album artist and that is not currently happening - there is an issue here!
The album is in the correct artist folder as well.
Is someone willing to actually help me troubleshoot this?
Plex has no support for collaboration albums. If you try and force it, you will end up with situations like this one.
The first album has been matched in the database to the single artist “Marie Davidson”, and subsequently the artist’s name was changed according to the content of the Album Artist tag in that first album. So it now reads “Marie Davidson & L’Œil Nu”, but it still actually means just “Marie Davidson” solo.
So all other albums by Marie Davidson will be merged into the same album artist.
The method to fix this:
edit the album artist in Plex to read only “Marie Davidson”. Make sure to edit not just the album, but the actual artist entry in Plex.
avoid mentioning more than one album artist in the Album Artist meta tag.
Which of course means that you will have to make a conscious decision, to which one of the involved artists you want this album assigned in your server’s artist list.
Then populate the Album Artist meta tag accordingly.
You can still mention all the artists in the regular “[track] artist” tag, so they at least appear during playback, and when looking at the track list of that particular album.
Oh boy, okay - thank you again and sorry for my frustrated tone. I guess as my library has grown, so have the difficulties. I did not have these problems a few years ago when I initially got Plex setup and only recently did things seem to start changing in negative ways regarding how music is managed. It’s quite unfortunate.
Looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me, then. I appreciate your help. Hopefully this is the end of the quirks I run into in trying to get Plex to follow my metadata properly.
