I think that the Album Artist tag needs to be ONE NAME ONLY even if that is not what you want for the album. It’s like the “file this under” name and you have to pick just one name.
“Various Artists” is a special reserved Album Artist tag that is used for such albums.
Tracks can have multiple and differing Artist tags (use a null separator), though AFAIK Plex does not actually look at any Artist tags past the first one, at least in some file formats.
It can take a lot of work to get your library metadata to Plex’s liking. While you are doing this, I suggest you work like this…
- Turn off every kind of time-consuming metadata lookup like artist bios and concert dates.
- Turn off every kind of time consuming media analysis
- When you make a change to your library metadata and you want to see if it helped, DELETE the library and re-add the music folder. This forces a total rebuild, which is always the best procedure if you are testing big changes. (If all metadata changes were always picked up perfectly, we wouldn’t have a link for the Plex Dance.)
- Once everything looks right, turn all the fancy features back on, rescan the library, and enjoy Plex.
