Server Version#: 1.29.0.6244
Player Version#: Web 4.87.2
I noticed, suddenly, that much of my music has become tagged by PMS as a randomly selected artist’s name. It seems to mostly plague what has been labeled as Album Artist: “Various Artists”. However, it seems to be messing with music outside that group as well. I’ve got a playlist for example that is a simple filter of X genre greater than 3 stars and this playlist was filled with all sorts of other music that does not match that criterion (or at least it didn’t match it before this sudden occurrence). I say was, because after reading this post ( Loads of compilation albums matching as "Joy Division" ) I did as instructed and performed the Plex Dance and I’ve, of course, lost my song ratings (ugh), thus wrecking that playlist.
Following what was suggested in that post did not solve my issue.
I can watch PMS’s “Recently Added” section while the Library is updating and I can see that an album will initially show as “Various Artists” and then when the metadata is updated by Plex, it changes it to “Claude Monnet Presents Monica Nogueira”, which is its current artist of choice to tag everything with.
What is really bothering me here is, I’m not understanding what happened or, more importantly, why this has happened now. I’ve had a very stable music library on PMS for years. Over the last couple of years, I’ve bought and added very little music, as well. My organizational structure for my music directory-wise on my SSD has been the same for years, as well. So why the sudden misbehavior of PMS.
Did something happen in a recent PMS update that has caused this?
I’m working on my metadata as I type this and checking it for integrity.
What I don’t understand is what I stated in my OP — why now? My music has been organized as it is organized for nearly as long as I’ve had Plex. Why has this, now, cropped up as an issue?
This is a long standing issue, nobody seems to know when or how this happens, but at some point it just does - Plex picks one random artist for all new “Various Artists” albums it scans. Has nothing to do with your tags.
You can fix it by doing Settings → Troubleshooting → Optimize Database, then Plex will scan those albums correctly again, for a while.
I’ve ensured all of the Various Artists are, indeed, tagged correctly. I even went as far as to change them all to something other than Various Artists and then change them all back to Various Artists in case there was one or more of them with some invisible character causing them to be treated as a separate Various Artists. I’ve seen that behavior with other tags throughout Plex.
Even after all that, when I add the Various Artists directory back into Plex, it continues to change them to some random artist name.
I’m about to try adding one folder at a time and see if I can figure out if there is an offending folder or folders that is/are causing the problem.
Thanks for the tip, I’ll try that.
EDIT: Optimize Database didn’t fix it or make a difference. I am seeing that some albums are showing as Various Artists now, but they will load with no artwork even though they all have artwork. Refreshing metadata doesn’t address the missing artwork, either. This whole situation is very strange to me. I’ve now got most of my Various Artists continuing to be incorrectly tagged as "Claude Monnet Presents Monica Nogueira”, but also have some that are correctly tagged as Various Artists, but have no album art.
I spent 12 hours over the weekend going through and hand touching every single one of the tracks associated with “Various Artists” I made sure all the tags were clean and correct. I even added artwork from discogs.com to every single track.
What I’m seeing reflected in Plex isn’t making sense. It’s loading these tracks as though they had wrong metadata and are displaying without their artwork — even tracks that are not Various Artists, but were tracks I moved out of Various Artists and into correct locations with a specific Artist name.
I’ve done the Plex Dance and I’ve tried the suggested Optimize Database, but nothing is fixing these issues.
I really love how this just happened out-of-the-blue.
I followed the link and did what you outlined to the letter.
Since I last posted, I removed all the Various Artists, did the Plex Dance and added only one Various Artists album. It immediately tagged this album as "Claude Monnet Presents Monica Nogueira”.
What do I do from here? Completely delete my library and start all over again?
EDIT: As I am investigating further, it is taking Soundtracks and doing this same thing to them. For instance Jimmy Cliff “The Harder They Come” is here: /music/Jimmy Cliff/The Harder They Come/ and, yet it is also being tagged as ""Claude Monnet Presents Monica Nogueira”. I don’t even have one of these weird “Soundtracks” directory nor do I use “Soundtracks” as a genre, but it is doing this to other albums it has identified as Soundtracks.
I searched within Plex for “Claude Monnet Presents Monica Nogueira” and it came up with a number of variously random tracks scattered throughout the library.
I then went and pulled each and every one of those tracks out of the Library’s directory structure and did the Plex Dance.
I then re-added the single Various Artists album I had tried earlier and it is now showing up as “Various Artists”. Whew.
At this stage, it seems clear that the mess is to be found within these few tracks that Plex tagged as “Claude Monnet Presents Monica Nogueira”.
At least, I am finally seeing a light at the end of the tunnel here.
To clarify: Optimize Database fixes it for albums that are added afterwards, it doesn’t fix already (wrongly) scanned albums, for those you’ll have to fix the album artist yourself, select, edit, change to “Various Artists”.