Server Version#: 1.18.8.2527
Player Version#: Version 4.31.1
Recently all of my Various Artists compilation albums are no longer tagged as Various Artists, but tagged as some random other artist. Trying to use the “Fix Match” or “Unsplit” options are not working. The Plex Match service even recognizes these compilations as “Various Artists” and matches to 100% when trying to Fix Match manually. This had been working as expected until recently. I would prefer to not edit the metadata on my tracks, but instead use the built in functionality of the Plex and embedded match.
You’re not the only one, there seems to be a problem with the scanner. I’ve not been able to find out what combination triggers it but it happens. You can fix it in bulk by editing the SQLite database of Plex directly (there’s an application called “DB Browser for SQLite” that can do it) and changing the artist ID for those compilations, but it is a pain.
You can also try to retag your files to manually set “Various Artists” as album artist and reimport, but that breaks the handling of compilations in other library managers (eg iTunes/Music), so do that when you only use Plex as your music library.
I can tell you how to prevent it.
(Didn’t I explain it to you in a different thread? Might have been someone else though… )
‘Prefer local metadata’ is activated in the properties of the music library
Plex is expecting all music to be in a folder hierarchy:
Music → Album Artist → Album → Tracks
This applies to sampler/various artists albums as well!
So, if you have albums with differing ‘Album Artist’ metatags stored inside the same ‘Album Artist’ folder, then it is mostly determined by accident, which of these differing album artists will be used for all albums stored inside this folder.
In other words:
If you have e.g. /music/Various Artists/Sampler 1
and maybe /music/Various Artists/Sampler 2
you absolutely have to make sure that all files inside both Sampler 1 and Sampler 2 are tagged with the same ‘Album Artist’ name.
Yes I know Plex likes the Album Artist tag populated with “Various Artists”. However this is nonstandard and breaks compilation handling in other software (like iTunes/iPhones/navidrome/etc) so I would like to avoid it.
But fortunately the Plex scanner is normally smart enough to pick up compilations with empty Album Artists, and will fill in “Various Artists” itself. However, after the initial scan, in some cases, when new compilations are added the scanner picks a random Artist to use as AA instead. In other cases, it does apply “Various Artists” correctly. I just haven’t been able to find out what triggers this different behaviour.
I’m having a truly horrendous time with scanning a new library (that was already in a previous Plex installation just fine btw). I’ve currently got tracks from one Artist showing up under 3 different ones. I’ve run these files through beets, 100% matches and that still isn’t good enough for Plex’s metadata matching.
I’d just like to start using Plexamp full time but it’s gotten to the point I’m adding artists folder by folder and trying to manually fix them. These files are original CD rips going back 20 years, the metadata was correct when ripped using dbPoweramp and is verified correct once again using Beets. See the screenshot and Steven Wilson CD example.
Another issue I’m having is I had to manually fix the album art for Green Day - American Idiot (does it get any more mainstream than this?). Again, the metadata for Green Day is correct. Why is Plex going so bananas all of a sudden?
Plexamp certainly looks promising so I just took the plunge and added my music collecion. But indeed it makes a mess. For me the compilations seems to be the main cullprit. Even though everything is in a folder Various Artists with different sub folders. It does not keep the songs together and the picture just seems to be random pictures from other songs within that folder. Plex could use a good metadata editor so you can correct files easily in the database directly and where you can lock the record so that a rescan does not screw things up.
I doubt this will be everyones issue but in my case, /tmp was not writeable by Plex in my container for some reason. Fixed that and things went back to normal.
‘Prefer local metadata’ is activated in the properties of the music library
So, if I create a new library without this, Plex handles VA correctly? I have this ticked mainly to get my preferred (embedded) album art rather than whatever random source Plex comes up with, but if it fixes the VA handling I’ll give it a go.
I was going to rant about why compilations shouldn’t be that hard to get right, then I started thinking about all the various combinations of tags you could encounter and what you’d need to do with them. So I’ll cut them a little slack, it’s not easy to do well. Doesn’t mean I can’t still complain about it though!
Probably not, because now the album artist name is taken from Musicbrainz.org
And if you happen to have an album within your Sampler folder, which is filed under a different album artist than the rest of the albums in there, you have the same problem.
This has been happening for quite a while for me (I’m on the public release upgrade choice.)
I have several directories with singles… 45s, etc. 1970s, 1980s, etc. Well Plex seems to now be confusing additions to these directories as all Various Artists. Each mp3 has both the artist, albumartist and very often, albumartistsort and artistsort fields populated. For each single the artist is duplicated in the ALBUMARTIST field, as this is correct. The product had only one artist.
Plex now says these are Various Artists.
If you make the mistake I did, which was to select one of these songs and EDIT it in plex–the first filed you see is “ALBUM ARTIST: Various Artists” DO NOT CHANGE THIS! This is “Various Artists” the “artist” All various artist records will show THIS text. I changed one to “Elton John and Bernie Taupin” and all Various Artists added now said “Elton John and Bernie Taupin”. Took me quite a while to figure that out.
So 200 songs in a folder means it is various artists with dozens of “album” names. Even worse, songs are scanning in with no title and no artists and being dumped inside other wrongly various albums. The second image shows three missing songs lumped under the wrong album with no title and no artist. ??WT??
Yes my tags are correct… Itunes imports them fine. MP3TAG shows them correctly, VLC , etc. Only plex is getting them all wrong.
As i was doing a lot of edits and adding new songs, I found that Plex was scanning music in response to changes. I think i THINKS it is firing off a partial music scan… but each partiial appears to be a full scan. So i end up with dozens of full scans queued up. And I have a huge collection (north of 1,100 CDs & LPs). So music is the SLOWEST scan. My cleanup work on thursday afternoon was still scanning this morning. And none of the TV additions were showing up. That was because it was still processing the many multiple full music scans. I had to cancel over and over, then I would see a Movie Scan or a TV scan, then another musc–cancel, another music-- cancel. I did this over and over until all the scanner finally stopped. SO that logic is fubar’d in my version. And it has been that way for a bit. Took me a couple of times to recognize what was causing it.
It didn’t do mess up the single songs this badly before(I’ve been running plex since 2010~2011), but it has been doing this for a few months. I’m running Version 1.18.7.2457. I don’t aggressively update because I seldom see something that I want or need in the What’s New. I want stability first and foremost. The features being added rarely spark my interest anymore.
This doesn’t work in Plex.
You need to treat a single just like an album. The above mentioned rules apply to them as well. If you simply collect them all in a folder together, then Plex only sees a sampler album because every track in the folder has a different artist.
After multiple years having problems with Various Artists Music Albums, I finally found the source of the problem.
After adding a new Various Artists album, the album categorized as another artist (but not Various Artists), in this for example Vangelis.
Solution : the problem is not the new (Various Artists) album you just have added. The problems are the mp3 tags of the Artist where the new Album is wrongly sent to, in this example Vangelis. When verifying every Vangelis mp3, all ‘Album Artist’ tags are nicely pointing to Vangelis. Correct, but … There is a hidden Tag (at least hidden for MediaMonkey I’m using to change my Tags) called ALBUMARTISTSORT (Name used in Mp3Tag) or Album Artist Sort Order (Name used in MusicBrainz). For one or more mp3-files in the Vangelis album the ALBUMARTISTSORT tag is still ‘Various Artist’. Remove that tag from any mp3-file of Vangelis, take that music out of the database, Empty Trash, bring back in the database and problem solved. Another Artists might show up with the same problem. Follow the same procedure for the next one. To find the ALBUMARTISTSORT Tag with Mp3Tag, select ONE or multiple Mp3’s, right click and select the option Tags. In the same screen you can remove the Tag. In MusicBrainz, the Tag is directly visible. You can remove it from that screen as well.
I kind of understand the Plex agent behavior of deciding that everything in a directory containing more than one artist makes the MP3s in that folder “Various Artists” (and I’m trying to fix those issues with my loose MP3s in various directories). What I don’t understand is why the Plex agent is picking a random artist name and tagging damned near everything that should be “Various Artists” with that specific artist. It’s a ridiculous bug creating whack-a-mole maintenance that’s ruining Plex for me.
Because you probably activated the checkbox “Prefer local metadata”. If you do that, Plex will use whatever album artist is stored in the meta tags. If there are several conflicting meta tags within one folder, it is down to chance which is used.
Because you probably activated the checkbox “Prefer local metadata”. If you do that, Plex will use whatever album artist is stored in the meta tags. If there are several conflicting meta tags within one folder, it is down to chance which is used.
No it’s not that - I’ve now encountered it too often over the past two years or so, these random wrong artists are never in the tags. They’re from entirely different albums.
I suspect it’s because Plex stores a compilation in the internal DB (com.plexapp.plugins.library.db) as if it’s an album by some dude called “Various Artists”. Looking at the database structure, what I presume the scanner does (devs please confirm): when the scanner concludes an album is a compilation, it does a lookup for “Various Artists” in the artists list (in the metadata_items table, artists are the records with metadata_type = 8), it gets back the id value for that record, and stores this id in the parent_id field for the album record (which has metadata_type = 9).
This is how all artists and albums are linked together in the DB: albums have a parent_id field, that references the record of the artist. Normally, this lookup of “Various Artists” retrieves the correct artist and id, and all is well.
For some reason, sometimes this lookup breaks and consistently returns the id of another artist in the DB. Plex then applies this wrong id to any subsequent compilation album it scans, and worse of all: this keeps going wrong. You can fix it temporarily by editing the DB and removing this “wrong” artist from the DB (or if you don’t want to edit the database manually, merge the wrong artist with another artist, which effectively does the same), for a while Plex will then pick the correct “Various Artists” again, but sooner or later it breaks again.
@certuna@rrusson
Have you verified the procedure i have posted on October 25. After removing ALBUMARTISTSORT tags with “Various Artists” as content, I have never had any problems anymore with my database. And the ‘Prefer local metadata’ is still enabled ! I would be surprised this is not the solution for your ‘Various Artists’ problem as well. Folder structures do not influence my database anymore.
Disabling local metadata helped a lot, but there’s still a little weirdness. Changing Album Artist in folders with an assortment to “Various Artists” helps too, but with a collection of nearly 7,000 folders (some full albums, some filled with random tracks collected over the last two decades), I’ve got a lot of clean-up to do. I’ll keep trying different media organizers and wiping tags like ALBUMARTISTSORT, hoping for an easy fix. If all else fails, maybe I’ll “roll my own” little utility to reorg the collection/tags to make Plex happy.
)
