I’ve recently set up Plexamp for the first time, using my CD library ripped and tagged with iTunes.
For the most part it looks as I expect, but there are some weird things that I can’t fathom how to fix.
I have all The Beatles albums tagged with “The Beatles” as artist and album artist, but Plexamp has almost all of them under “The Beatles & Tony Sheridan”, which is the artist and album artist for one album.
It’s done the same with U2 - everything is listed under “U2 & Green Day”, even though just one single is tagged with that artist and album artist, and everything else is just tagged U2.
All Dolly Parton solo albums are listed under “Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn & Tammy Wynette”, which is a separate artist with one album.
Using the most recent version of Plex Server running on a Windows PC. Use local metadata is ticked in the Plexamp/server options.
Nothing of this has to do specifically with Plexamp. It has to do with how Plex Server is reading your files, thereby interpreting the embedded meta tags and the folder structure of your files.
Thanks - I’ve read that, but it doesn’t seem to address my specific problem, which is Plex Server conflating artists with similar but different Artist/Album Artist metadata fields.
Based on the metadata, “U2” and “U2 & Green Day” should be treated as separate artists, as these are used in separate folders with both Artist and Album Artist set to the correct information.
iTunes and Poweramp both recognise these as separate artists based on the metadata in the files, but this is not the case with Plex Server/Plexamp.
The Beatles/Abbey Road/Track 1 etc
The Beatles & Tony Sheridan/Early Tapes Of The Beatles/Track 1 etc
But Plexamp is combining all of these under The Beatles & Tony Sheridan, ignoring that all of The Beatles albums are in the folder called “The Beatles” and that artist and album artist are tagged correctly.
Nowhere in the folder structure, file names or metadata is Tony Sheridan mentioned for Abbey Road, Revolver etc, but these are all listed under “The Beatles & Tony Sheridan”.
Plex does only support one AlbumArtist per album.
So the “Beatles and Tony Sheridan” album is subsumed with all other Beatles albums. And because apparently this album got added first, Plex uses the AlbumArtist content from this album for the overall “Beatles” artist name.
The Beatles & Tony Sheridan is the artist and album artist for one album, “Early Tapes Of The Beatles”. The Beatles (stand-alone) isn’t mentioned on the release, or in the metadata.
The Beatles is the artist and album artist for all of The Beatles releases - Abbey Road, Revolver etc. Tony Sheridan isn’t mentioned anywhere in the folder structure or metadata for these albums/tracks.
“The Beatles” and “The Beatles & Tony Sheridan” don’t appear together on any compilation albums, or any of the albums correctly tagged with artist and album artist metadata.
I am not talking about compilations.
The wrong albumartist must have come from somewhere. And since you have that one album separated into a different albumartist folder, the chances are high that it either contains no albumartist meta tag at all, or the wrong one.
This problem is common across artists where they have names containing the names of other, separate, artists.
The Beatles/The Beatles & Tony Sheridan
U2/U2 & Green Day
Dolly Parton/Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette & Loretta Lynne
In all these cases, the metadata, including both artist and album artist, is correct. All other audio programmes I use, such as Poweramp and iTunes, manages these artists correctly, without further interference at metadata level.
“Prefer local meta data tags” is checked. But I can only assume that Plexamp is, for some reason, ignoring this option when an artist name contains that of another artist.
My initial post on Reddit received replies from other users who have encountered the same problem in the same way:
My files are a mixture of MP3 and AAC. They all play correctly, it’s just this tagging issue that is a problem. And the MusicBrainz suggestion wouldn’t explain why it’s adding all of the non-Tony Sheridan albums to “The Beatles & Tony Sheridan” in the plexamp apps.
It very much does.
Since Plex only allows one albumartist, this particular album is merged into all the other Beatles albums. In the Plex server database, it is now a regular Beatles album.
In the Plex server database, the Artist “Beatles” is only created once. At the time when the first album is scanned that is credited to the Beatles.
But since it is tagged as “Beatles and Tony Sheridan”, and you told Plex to prefer the content of the meta tags, Plex is using the content of the albumartist tag of that album because it somehow read it before the albumartist tag of any of the other Beatles albums.
Your files:
The Album Artist tag contains “The Beatles & Tony Sheridan”. As per my explanations above, this is what can end up as Artist name for all Beatles albums.
And they are both stored together in the same artist folder.
My recommendation would be to change the album artist tag to “The Beatles” even on that Sheridan album.
Then Plex Dance all albums within that artist folder.
So it’s a shortcoming of Plex server not allowing similar album artists, and effectively reading “The Beatles” and “The Beatles & Tony Sheridan” as the same thing, despite all metadata being correct and different between the two.
It’s disappointing, but I’ll just have to live with it.
I guess I am confused because OP says they are in different Artist folders, but Otto’s screen shot shows they are all in a Beatles artist folder. In the former case I would expect it to work as OP wants, in the latter case I would expect errors.
Otto’s screen shot also shows a tag name of “Album-Artist” which if literal isn’t correct, right? It uses a space, not a dash.
Just to piggyback on this, I have had the same problem that Groaninjock describes in the past, which I only fixed by doing the Plex Dance with the files.
In my case, as in the OPs, my albums were all correctly tagged and stored in separate folders. I’ve had this happen a variety of times, always with an artist which exists in my library (say, Wes Montgomery) and another “artist” such as Wes Montgomery & Jimmy Smith.
Plex likes to “assume” that the albums that are just Wes Montgomery are actually Wes Montgomery & Jimmy Smith, even though they are in a Wes Montgomery folder with all the tags 100% correct. And, when I’ve changed these tags/metadata in Plex BACK to just, say, Wes Montgomery, after a few minutes Plex changes them BACK to Wes Montgomery & Jimmy Smith, even though there is absolutely no reason for Plex to do that.
The original file structure I saw from the OP, which was in the Plexamp reddit (linked to above), shows a clearly separate file structure. I’ve posted about this many times, and it’s never really been addressed.
So really, all I’m saying is that the OP is not crazy, and this is behavior I’ve seen before on more than one occasion.
Thanks for clarifying. I would agree that what you guys are seeing is not correct, especially with Prefer local metadata switched on.
If it is expected behavior then I think that is something Plex should change–better, they should add formal support for multiple artists within the Album Artist tag.
(I don’t have this issue but that is because I tag my multi-artist albums in another way.)
I don’t want to hijack this thread from the OP, but we have the same problem; elan, my settings are the same as those in your screenshot, apart from that I have Sonic Analysis enabled, although I’ve seen this problem in my files since before Sonic Analysis was even introduced. (Refer to the posts I linked to in the OP’s original reddit post.)
As I said, even when I would change the artists to be correct, Plex would change them back, usually within a couple minutes of my manual change. I don’t know if that helps at all in terms of what Plex may be doing, or if there’s a different setting the OP and I should consider in light of that information. (If Plex was just mis-assigning an album name initially, I wouldn’t consider it a problem, but in my case, at least, Plex would consistently move the albums back to the wrong artists.)
That also doesn’t make sense to me (unless there was a scan actively occurring at the same time, maybe?)
At this point, I’d love a full set of media server logs from someone who creates a library with those two albums and has them conjoined improperly. Scan them in, and then upload logs here.
