Plex Web App Reverting Artist Name

[eltigre1000]

Server Version#: 1.27.0.5889
Player Version#: Plex Web Version 4.76.1 (windows)

This post is about music files that I’m trying to update the artist name for using the Chrome Windows Plex Media Server, accessed through the small icon in my taskbar tray.

I have CDs by two artists:

The Tallest Man on Earth

and

The Tallest Man on Earth and yMusic

the latter being a collaboration between the aforemention and another artist, yMusic. (I wish the artist names weren’t so awkward for this post.)

However, ALL the music by JUST The Tallest Man on Earth is listed under The Tallest Man on Earth and yMusic.

If I look at the album metadata for these solo albums, the Artist is listed as The Tallest Man on Earth and yMusic.

Likewise, if I look at an individual track, the Album Artist is listed as The Tallest Man on Earth and yMusic.

However, the files themselves are in my music folder on my PC in a subfolder for solely The Tallest Man on Earth - there’s no mention of yMusic in the file structure, and the file, originally tagged in iTunes, also doesn’t make any mention of yMusic. Yet for some reason Plex decided, when I imported my library, to lump all of them together under the collaborative name The Tallest Man on Earth and yMusic.

If I edit the metadata for the album (by clicking on the pencil in the lower left of the album artwork) and change the Artist to simply The Tallest Man on Earth, it correctly removes it from the The Tallest Man on Earth and yMusic screen momentarily, and then Plex immediately puts it back and changes the artist back to the collaborative.

Same result if I view the album, click on the circle next to “10 Tracks” to select all 10 tracks, and then change the Album Artist in that screen to The Tallest Man on Earth - it is appropriately tagged and sorted momentarily, and then my changes are undone by Plex.

Even using the “Match” function for the album and matching it to the correct one, which is just by The Tallest Man on Earth, doesn’t result in the correct tagging or sorting.

Why can’t I “separate” out the albums by an individual artist from those of an artist (collaborative) that shares part of its name? Why is Plex conflating the solo albums of one artist with those of a collaboration the artist had with another group?

Edited to Add:

I tried changing the Artist to xxxThe Tallest Man on Earth, and it kind of worked - Plex decided to change the name of the Artist to The Tallest Man on Earth, inexplicably dropping the “xxx” I put in front of the artist name, but it appears to have stopped lumping it together with the collaboration, at least for the time being.

[beckfield]

Is the “Prefer local metadata” option enabled for this library? If so, can you show us screenshots of your tagging program showing at least these tags:

Album artist
Track artist
Album title
Track titles
Track number
Disc number (if it’s a multi-disc album)

If “Prefer local metadata” is not enabled, please show a screenshot of your file manager showing the folder/filename structure of the files. Also please indicate which folder is specified in the Plex library.

[matthers]

What you will find (as i’ve just been battling the same issue) is that tagging stuff in Plex doesn’t actually change the metadata of the file itself. Am guessing on the file system, those files have metadata which you don’t want and Plex keeps reverting to them. You can either change the option as previously suggested in another comment, or fix up the metadata for the files themselves. I use mp3tag to fix mine up - it has a very useful tagging option which allows it to go and find the album in Musicbrainz database. Just make sure all files exist for the album and are in the right order before auto-tagging them all. I sometimes create dummy files to fill in the blanks when i’m tagging an incomplete album, then delete the dummy files after they’re all tagged

[eltigre1000]

“Prefer local metadata” (found in by clicking on the 3 dots next to my music library, going to Manage Library → Edit, just to make sure we’re all looking at the same thing) IS enabled, yes.

Here’s a screenshot from Mp3tag showing the tags you asked for - “discnumber” is blank, but it’s not a multi-disc album.

[eltigre1000]

[quote="matthers]
Am guessing on the file system, those files have metadata which you don’t want and Plex keeps reverting to them. [/q]

No, the file metadata (as shown in the screenshot above) is EXACTLY what I want. Plex is “inventing” its own tags and deciding that the artist is someone different than what the file structure (which you can see in the path column in the screenshot) indicates it is, and different from what the artist in the tags is.

I had a similar problem in the past with the jazz artists Brother Jack McDuff and George Benson. They did an album together for which the tracks were tagged as Artist: Brother Jack McDuff and George Benson.

I added another album by Brother Jack McDuff (on his own, tagged with Artist: Brother Jack McDuff) and Plex continually “decided” the artist for this solo album was Brother Jack McDuff and George Benson.

The problem is occurring (apparently) when there’s an artist with a name that begins with the name of another artist; it’s almost like Plex is doing some sort of “autocomplete” based on the longer artist name. (Or at least that’s my view as someone who doesn’t know how Plex really works under the hood.)

[beckfield]

It used to be that, if Album Artist was blank, Plex would use the track artist if they are all the same, and “Various Artists” if they weren’t. In recent releases, though, Plex has had trouble if the Album Artist field was left blank. So my suggestion is to populate Album Artist and see what Plex does with it.

[eltigre1000]

Since making this post, I did actually “fix” my problem, inadvertently.

I changed all the albums in question, including the collaborative one, to Artist: The Tallest Man on Earth.

Then, I changed the collaborative one BACK to Artist: The Tallest Man on Earth and yMusic.

This seems to have separated them; it doesn’t make any sense WHY, but oh well.

If it happens again (which I suppose it’s likely to eventually, but not anytime soon), I’ll mess with the Album Artist field. However, even if that field is blank, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why Plex would decide to populate it with anything other than the Artist with which the songs are associated. But, as you say, Plex “has had trouble” with it.

Thanks for the suggestions.