Soundtrack albums filing under Nancy Sinatra for some reason

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Server Version#: 1.20.1.3252
Player Version#: 4.42.1

For some reason Plex lists soundtrack albums with credit to Nancy Sinatra as the artist. I’d expect them to be Various Artists.

Furthermore, if I run “fix match” on the albums one by one, the Sinatra credit is removed until eventually it says there’s nothing left by Sinatra, but when I go back to my music library, Sinatra is back, and the albums will have returned to being listed as by her.

I don’t have any music by Sinatra, so I have no clue why her name would be applied to these albums. Something is definitely odd here.

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That’s not it - I’ve seen this behaviour many times before, it’s an actual bug. Normally the Plex scanner is smart enough to detect various artists compilations and picks the correct Album Artist for it (namely, “Various Artists”), but occasionally it gets confused and picks a random artist and sticks with that for all subsequent compilations it scans. I’ve had various times where after a rescan suddenly dozens of compilations got attributed to The Muppets, AC/DC or Turbonegro (bizarrely enough).

It’s not difficult to fix things afterwards: select all those misattributed albums, change Album Artist. After you’ve done that, the scanner should work correctly for a while, picking the correct “Various Artists” for compilations. We’ll have to wait for a fix.

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Yeah, it’s as if in the backend Plex makes a database entry for an artist named “Various Artists” and later updates the name in that database entry, so every album associated with that artist database entry has their names changed too.

Right now I’m looking at a bunch of albums listing Nancy Sinatra, but a newly added album listing “Various Artists” correctly, as if the newly added album caused a new database entry to be created.

Is there a thread tracking this issue somewhere? One problem is that this issue is hard to search for in the forums, so different people might be reporting the same thing with their different artist names.

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I say that’s exactly it. Particularly when you enable ‘prefer local meta tags’.

If your files contain meta tags which tell Plex that the AlbumArtist is something else than Various Artists, then Plex will duly take this hint.

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There is most certainly an issue here. I have prefer local tags enabled, and I spent about three hours creating and renaming folders to specifically match the respective metadata, according to the Plex naming structure suggested here.

I’ve attached a screenshot that clearly shows a song “Arrival to Earth” by Patrik Pietschmann, in the correct folder structure, with the correct metadata (especially album artist) being thrown into a “Various Artists” album with a random cover.

Note that the songs are all very different from each other and are all named and organized appropriately. There is no reason for Plex to be grouping these songs together.

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I checked out the thread you linked to, which mentioned “So, if you have albums with differing ‘Album Artist’ metatags” but I made sure that wasn’t the case with these albums.

They all have the same Album Artist metatag, and it’s “Various Artists”.

That’s a huge part of what I’m seeing. My files have Album Artist as Various Artists, and yet Plex DOESN’T take the hint, setting them to Nancy Sinatra instead.

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Maybe, your Various Artists was already renamed to Nancy Sinatra. You need to use Fix Match on the artist to change it back.

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Please show me the folder structure of this album. Are all these tracks supposed to appear within the same album?

Here is a Various Artists album with its folder structure, file names and embedded meta tags which does work:

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First, thank you for taking the time to help me out. I apologize for being curt previously, and I appreciate your help.

I’ve taken many screenshots to try and be as thorough as possible and give you lots of information to work with.

When I transferred my music from somewhere else to Plex, all of the albums were organized correctly, but all the singles were “free floating” (all the song files were in the root folder). I thought this was the issue, so I spent some time creating a folder for each single so that every song would be in music/artist/album/song.

I downloaded mp3tag since it seems useful. Using it I’ve realized that some albums that I have under a certain artist are actually supposed to be various artists according to the metadata, so I can fix that. These albums don’t cause a problem to Plex though, as they seem to be recognized normally and not being mixed up.

However, there are still many songs that are in the correct folder that matches the metadata that are still being grouped together into this random mega album. I am using the first three songs in this “album” as an example.

Here is the metadata and folder structure for the first song, Arrival to Earth. This is what Plex tells me the metadata is when I check on the web app.

Here is the metadata and folder structure for the second song, The Avatar’s Love. This is what Plex tells me the metadata is when I check on the web app.

Here is the metadata and folder structure for the third song, The Avengers. This is what Plex tells me the metadata is when I check on the web app.

As you can see, each of these songs is organized as per the /music/artist/album/song method, and the folder names match the metadata for Album Artist and Album. This is the case for every song in this “album”.

I’ve also attached the album metadata according to Plex, as well as the info section that shows the path of these files as further confirmation that the folder structure is correct.

My best guess for what’s happening here is that Plex grouped all of these songs under one album when they were free floating, using the first album artist name and album name it could find (“ABBA” & “100 Greatest Science Fiction Themes” would be first alphabetically in their respective categories). As for how to correct it, I’m hoping that’s where you can come in and help me out.

Sorry if this is a confusing post, I just tried to provide as much information and detail as I could. Thank you again.

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Many of your screenshots are very small print. I cannot zoom them enough to make out the file names and folder structure. So I’m sailing a bit blind here.
Take all files which are currently a part of this messed-up meta album.
move them outside of the folder where Plex can “see” them.
Scan library
wait until it is finished
empty library trash
now move the folders back, slowly, one artist at a time, then scan library files again.

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I think if you open the links you should be able to click on them to zoom in. That’s what it shows for me at least.

I’m trying your suggestion now and will get back to you with the results

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I have no idea why Various Artists would have ever been renamed to Nancy Sinatra. That’s part of why this all seems like a bug that needs to be fixed.

I tried using Fix Match already. It worked for a second, but when I went back to the library a few minutes later it reverted to Nancy Sinatra. Again, that’s after all of the metadata was confirmed to have Various Artists as Album Artist.

So that only made the behavior more confusing.

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Removing and readding the messed up album files worked. Everything is organized and recognized correctly. Not sure why scanning wasn’t enough and i had to remove and re add most of my library but I’m just happy it works now.

Thank you so much for the help, have a nice day!

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So, back to my report… :slight_smile:

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