Server Version#: 1.27.0.5873
Player Version#: 4.82.1
Since the recent update to the Plex music scanner, the artist, “Various Artists” no longer shows up in the default view for the music library with the criteria as “All – Artists – Title” The only way to see all of my compilation/sampler albums is by using the advanced search options. A hard refresh of the browser, or reboot of the server doesn’t correct the problem.
Edit this artist and see if it has a different Sort Artist title applied, which makes it appear at a different position in the list.
I for example have it at the beginning, by setting the sort title to 00__Various Artists
For some reason, and I still suspect the new scanner is the problem, the sort artist was set to “Eric Clapton.”
I’m fairly certain none of my files have an embedded “Artist Sort” tag, I will look into that, but out of habit, I do try to ensure that any reference to the artist_sort field is removed before I add them to Plex. In any event, “Various Artists” appeared properly in the library view properly until the lastest server update.
As an aside, even though I have disabled the option to refresh local metadata during the maintenance period because the new scanner no longer reads multiple genres embedded in MP3’s, the entire library seems to have been refreshed, and all albums now seem to have only one genre. This problem, perhaps a coincidence, seems to have appeared at the same time.
I haven’t added a “Various Artist” album in the last 2 months, as this screenshot shows.
I think this was caused by a mixup, where albums with different AlbumArtist were stored inside the same Artist folder in media storage. This, combined with “prefer local metadata” ON has the potential to create havoc.
(Sigh…) MP3Tag doesn’t report a “Artist_sort” tag in any file in the Various Artists folder, and all report the album artist as “Various Artists.” The Eric Clapton album has one album with the artist_sort tag set to “Eric Clapton”. All albums in that folder have Eric Clapton as the “Album Artist.”
There are no albums by Eric Clapton in my Various Artists folder, or vice-versa.
Not sure where else to look for the problem. I realize that changing the “Artist Sort” manually will likely fix the problem, but I’d like to identify the reason this has happened. Anyway, thanks for the suggestions.
Forget the Artist_sort tag. It has very likely no influence on the matter.
The sort artist field is automatically constructed from the album artist. Which, as the artist record was created in the database was probably “Eric Clapton”.
This mixup was likely caused by the constellation I described above.
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