My Plex Media Player is connected to my Music file on a Synology NAS. It’s been working fine until recently. About a week ago the player for no apparent reason renamed all my compilation CDs ‘Kiss’ and all the individual artists disappeared. Kiss is the first band on the first compilation (there’s a total of 250 comps). Mp3tag shows that nothing has changed on the Synology files. Album Artist is still ‘Various’ and the individual artists are all there. Scanning or refreshing doesn’t help. I tried moving the Various file to a different drive and connecting it to a new Library in Plex, but that didn’t help either. Any suggestions?
The new Plex music system struggles with compilation albums. In order for it to work in an acceptable manner, every compilation has to have the exact same album artist.
If even one album or track has something different, such as a misspelled word, or no album artist at all, Plex will come up with some weird results for the compilation albums. And it will affect all of the albums properly matched until that time.
For example, I had about 70 compilations. All but one had “Various Artists” as the Album Artist in the embedded tags. One had “Various” as the album artist. All of my compilations became the artist of the first track of that album.
Thanks, that’s very helpful. Mine mostly have Various as the Album Artist, but some don’t. I’ll change them all to Various and see what happens. If that doesn’t work I’ll change them all to Various Artists.
It was sometime ago. I think I needed to do a “Refresh Metadata” from the artist page. Refreshing the metadata on the “bad” albums didn’t change anything.
Unfortunately that didn’t work, though now all my compilation CDs are called ‘Spencer Davis Group’ rather than ‘Kiss’ (which I suppose might be considered an improvement).
Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
As I said, the new Plex is easily confused by compilations, and now it just doesn’t know what to do. 
I would try going to your new, improved Various Artists page (the Spencer Davis Group), and use the fix match option. You find that at the top of the web app - the three dot thingy. You have to be at the artist page, it won’t work from any of the albums. Select the first choice, or the one that says, “Various Artists - add compilations to this artist”.
If that doesn’t work, try un-matching the artist first, then matching the same way as above.
If that doesn’t work, you’ll likely have to learn the PLEX DANCE. I think you can skip step 4 for music files.
The Various Artists albums are all now correctly displayed. The essential elements in fixing them were: 1) ensuring that Various Artists appears in all the Album Artists spaces on mp3tag, then 2)
doing the Plex Dance.
After that I did a rescan, then a refresh all metadata. Refresh normally takes a between one and two hours but after three hours it was still running so I was considering cancelling and re-refreshing,
but suddenly I could see all the Various Artists albums being corrected and it didn’t take long to get back to normal.
I had actually done the Plex Dance
before changing the tags to Various Artists, and it hadn’t worked, so clearly both steps were essential.
Thanks to leelynds for pointing this out.
No thanks to Plex for issuing an update containing this annoying bug which consumed many hours of my weekend.
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
