What is this behaviour?

[StevenERayner]

Latest weird behaviour as follows.
So I notice that Irish Heartbeat by Van Morrison & The Chieftains is misnamed as by Van Morrison only. I check the metadata of my files and sure enough it was my unchecked rip at fault. So I correct it then go into Plex and update the metadata and Plex changes it… along with all my other Van Morrison albums so that they are all now by Van Morrison & The Chieftains.
I tried changing it in Plex and it won’t stick.
Please help.
I’m so sick of this.

[OttoKerner]

@StevenERayner

Van Morrison

“Van Morrison and the Chieftains” is just an alias for “Van Morrison” over on https://musicbrainz.org/artist/a41ac10f-0a56-4672-9161-b83f9b223559
Which means that the albumartist on this album and all other VM albums is one and the same for Plex as well. So if you rename it, all albums by Van Morrison follow suit.

[StevenERayner]

So I have to live with Irish Heartbeat being mistagged or EVERYTHING ELSE? This is effing crazy.

Thanks Otto

[OttoKerner]

Make a distinction between Artist and AlbumArtist.
Put “Van Morrison and the Chieftains” as Artist on this one album,
but use “Van Morrison” as its AlbumArtist.

So you will end up with something like this:
Albumartist at the top,
Artist on every track below.

[StevenERayner]

Worked.

Thanks Otto!

[StevenERayner]

& Zappa & The Mothers is such a great example.

[OttoKerner]

Yep, very typical.
Ultimately, what you are doing is populating a database.
You have the hierarchy
AlbumArtist
Album
Tracks

And it just makes more sense in these cases to unify the Albumartist.
(Although some old-fart Zappatistas may protest vehemently, on my method to combine FZ’s later projects with the Mothers. But I don’t care. To me the distinction doesn’t exist.)

[beckfield]

The problem here isn’t that “Van Morrison and the Chieftains” is just an alias for “Van Morrison” at MusicBrainz (it actually isn’t on the alias list).

The problem is that Plex does not support crediting an album or a track to more than one artist. A long-standing feature request, if implemented, would fix this.

MusicBrainz actually credits “Irish Heartbeat” to “Van Morrison” and “The Chieftains” (two separate artists, not an alias for one).

[leelynds]

I have Van Morrison and Van Morrison & the Chieftains showing in my library as two separate artists. If you want them to appear that way, I would tag the “Irish Heartbeat” album with both the Album Artist and Track Artist as “Van Morrison and the Chieftains” You might have to Plex Dance the collaboration album to get it to show up as a new separate artist in your library.

I usually use MusicBrainz Picard for tagging, but I’m attaching screen shots from MP3Tag to show how I have them tagged.

It doesn’t properly address @beckfield 's concern, but the extended tag editor in MP3Tag shows both The Chieftains and Van Morrison as individual artists. There’s always the chance that Plex will address some of the music database shortcomings, and we won’t have to use this type of work-around (if this is one)