Various Artists album given random artist title

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Server Version#:1.44.0.2981
Player Version#:Plex for Mac 1.40.0.29481

This issue has been bugging me for ages, across several server and player versions, so I finally got around to asking for help if possible!

This issue has become so painful for me that I have split my main music collection into two libraries, one or for “Artists” and another for “Various Artists”., which I have grown to accept. However, with my Soundtrack albums I wanted to break these out into a single separate library, but have been frustrated enough to seek help here.

So some albums have a single artist, and others are made up of various artists. I use MP3Tag on the Mac to tag my files, using MusicBrainz to populate the tags, so setting the album artist to ‘Various Artists’ or the actual artists name. Up until now I have created sub folders for each letter of the alphabet, and stored these albums by the album title, so “Aquaman” would go into the “a” folder.

So because of this issue I moved all my files and folders out of the main library folder, re-scanned, and so emptied the library. I have then been adding the albums in small batches, each in their own folder, and re-scanning the library.

To start with things went as expected, with the albums being displayed as expected, showing the artist name, the album title. Even the first couple of “Various Artists” album showed correctly as “Various Artists”. Then I got to “Home Alone 2” which should have appeared as “Various Artists” but bizarrely shows as “Elton John & Bernie Taupin” - which is one of the previous albums (Gnomeo & Juliet).

Why on earth is this? I can add further artists albums without issue, but all subsequent “Various Artists” album show as “Elton John & Bernie Taupin”.

I have the removed the album folder, re-scanned to remove it, made some changes to the tags, and reloaded it, several times to try and figure out what is going on. The album artists tag is definitely correct, I have even changed it to “VA” or just “Various” and the same thing happens. However, if I change it to “Random Stuff” - it shows the artist as “Random Stuff”. I guess it is not just taking the literal text in that field and using it, there seems to be some special handling for various artist albums in some way?

I have tried creating a folder called “Various Artists” and placing the offending albums in there, but with no change to the outcome.

Any help or advice would be welcome!

Steve

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I think my issue is related: Loads of compilation albums matching as "Joy Division" - #13 by turkeyphant

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Hi, yes the result in the Plex Player does look the same, although my Album Artist field is populated correctly, although I have never followed the folder naming conventions.

I cleared out the library again and loaded just the “Various Artists” folder, and they all read in correctly, showing the artist as “Various Artists” - which potentially proves there is nothing wrong with the tagging in the files.

It did seem that particular albums would cause the issue, so the first being mentioned in my original post, “Gnomeo & Juliette” by “Elton John & Bernie Taupin”. Whenever I added this album subsequent Various Artists albums would appear under as “Elton John & Bernie Taupin” - so it had to be something wrong with that album?

So I thought I would clear out the tags and start again with that album, and then I noticed that MusicBrainz suggested that the album was in fact a “Various Artists” album - so I went with it and re-loaded it. I tentatively added another various artists album, and hey presto it all worked!

So, the issue is that Plex does not believe the tagging and is effectively overriding it, and then using that album artist name for all future albums for various artists.

Steve

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This seems to have been a problem for a long time - My various artists albums all get tagged as Pearl Jam. Before I moved and restarted my music server they would all get tagged with the name of some obscure woman singer who I had one song of.
It’s a bug and it’s not being fixed.
Just like the thing where my music library will scan forever for no reason and the CANCEL SCAN button does nothing and I have to shut down the server and restart to get it to stop scanning. I’ve posted about this issue multiple times over multiple years and never got any resolution.
I guess what we get is what we get. It works great most of the time - we should be grateful for that I guess.

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Been seeing stuff like this for a while. Plex doesn’t respect compilations. Apparently in their eyes, the only music you should have comes from Artist Albums…

I had this issue before it seems to be a part of Plex’s war on compilations. I solved it by having to manually assign “Various Artists” to these albums. However, that won’t work anymore on newer versions of Plex:

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