My audio library is arranged as prescribed and every track file is correctly tagged.
By example, I have /Music/Howlin_Wolf/[album 1..n] that contains my Howlin’ Wolf album collection.
Every track has Artist = “Howlin’ Wolf” and Album Artist=“Howlin Wolf”
When PMS scans it returns Album Artist = “Various Artists”
Is there an explanation why PMS gets it so wrong?
UPDATE:
Just noticed when I edit the Album in PMS and try to change the (ALbum) Artist to the correct artist, saving the changes has no effect.
However, if I add a random character, by example “Various Artists X” and SAVE, the artist field is loaded with the correct value, i.e. Howlin’ Wolf in the example.
This is all quite confusing… not to mention tedious.
I strongly recommend changing your metadata in the files themselves with a tool like mp3tag. Fixing the data in the Plex GUI means that work is lost if you ever need to rebuild the library.
In my experience the artist scramble you are seeing can happen when some other artist has badly tagged files. I would look at your whole library with mp3tag and make sure that Artist and Album Artist are set correctly everywhere. I suspect it is especially important to make sure the special Various Artists albums are all correct.
Yes, that sucks. It’s fragile. But if you do everything exactly how Plex wants it, you can have a large library without problems.
I strongly recommend changing your metadata in the files themselves with a tool like mp3tag.
As per my first post, My audio library is arranged as prescribed and every track file is correctly tagged.
By example, I have /Music/Howlin_Wolf/[album 1..n] that contains my Howlin’ Wolf album collection.
Every track has Artist = “Howlin’ Wolf” and Album Artist=“Howlin Wolf”
In other words the tag value for album artist reflects the correct Album Artist.
When PMS scans it returns Album Artist = “Various Artists”
In other words, PMS is not reading the tag value from the file correctly. In the example, the file’s ALBUM ARTIST is tagged as “Howlin Wolf”. When PMS scans it returns “VARIOUS ARTISTS”.
Why?
FYI and to be quite clear, , the tags in my files are fastidiously managed with Picard and Easytag.
As per my second (update post), If I change the Artist value in PMS’ artist field (please read my 2nd post), PMS then seems to “delete” (a garbage can icon appears briefly) the value from the database, re-read the file and and report the correct value from the file’s tags.
Here you say you are changing things inside PMS which is why I thought you were changing things inside PMS.
I apologize for not fully recognizing your exceptional tagging skills.
I’m sure you’ll get to the bottom of this and share a solution.
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