PMS picking up artirsts on albums as "Various Artists."

General Discussions
1

I ripped a bunch of CDs to FLAC an added them to my Plex Media Server, which is running on Ubuntu 18.04.x (up to date as of yesterday evening).

A few albums that I ripped are showing up with the Artist “Various Artists,” even though when I check the Vorbis tags, they’re all tagged with the same artist across the entire album. The current albums that are coming up under “Various Artists” are:

Jeff Lynne’s ELO - From Out of Nowhere (2019)
Three Dog Night - 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection: The Best of Three Dog Night (2000)
Kate Bush - The Sensual World (1989)
Tandy-Morgan Band - Earthrise (1992)

Various Artists

There were a few others, but I manually corrected those a few days ago.

What’s even odder is that I have TWO different Various Artists now. One contains all the albums that should be listed as various artists. The other contains all the albums that are not really Various Artists.

various artists 2

I use beets to tag all my music (https://beets.io/) and all these files are FLACs with vorbis tags.

2

If I re-scan the library, they stay as Various Artists. If I move the directory, let PMS remove the album, and then add it back, PMS picks it up under the right artist. Very odd.

3

Are you populating the “Album Artist” tags?

Each track within an album must have an identical Album Artist.

Do you strictly sort your albums by their AlbumArtist into folders, like so?

/Music
   /Album Artist
      /Album Title
         1. Track
4

Yes and yes.

5

Did you perhaps add all these albums at once?
If all the embedded tags are in order and you don’t have a deviating or missing Album Artist, you might have to indeed use the Plex dance “light” to resolve this.

6

Ok, I think I figured out at least SOME issues I was having. I use a tool called beets to tag all my music. If I re-import my album back into beets for whatever reason, it will delete the original files and copy the new ones over and re-tag them. When this happens, Plex seems to flake out and does weird things. One thing I saw about 15 minutes ago, is that it will change all the track names to the album name.

To fix it, I need to drag the directory that contains the album outside of the root music folder, update my library, add it back in, and update again. A full rescan of the library will not fix the issue.

7

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