Various artists sorting on large library = headache

General Discussions
1

Hi, i have a large music library pushing 1500 albums+. Alot of these are compliation albums which get the ‘Various Artists’ as the album artist. Obviously with having alot of these, i’ve noticed there is no real structure to how plex sorts them. For example two album that should be together that arent are ‘NOW 92’ and NOW 93’. Plex seems to just put the various artists together regardless and doesnt sort anymore. This is a complete nightmare when trying to find an album that your not 100% sure the name of! as you can see below, no real order

Cant believe am going to actually give this some credit but iTunes orders the albums via ‘Artist’ then via ‘Album name’ which is perfect and gets all the albums in a series together.

Any idea how to get plex to do this? Is it even possible for plex to currently do??

2

If I remember correctly, the default sort order is by release year in descending order, so most recent first.

You can specify a different default sort order by editing the server preferences. How to do this varies depending on your OS. Instructions on this page.

Keep in mind, whatever order you set will affect all artists, not just the ‘Various Artist’ listing.

3

I’ve tried the changes you linked me to… It made no difference to the library order at all. Am persuming there is no way to get a double sort on the music library? by artist then by album, would solve all the issues if there was!

4

You need to refresh the library after making that change. If it still doesn’t change, you may need to go so far as to do the “Plex Dance.”

As far as I know, there’s no way to do a two-factor sort.