Why are all my Various Artists albums showing as ‘Bob Marley’, despite being properly tagged?

[dmurph]

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For some reason almost all of my Various Artists albums show up in Plex as being Bob Marley.

Here’s a group of compilation albums I recently tagged and organized per Plex’s instructions that are mistakenly showing being attributed to Mr Marley (it should be noted, Bob Marley does not appear even once on any of these albums):

What I’ve done so far that should have prevented this:

I tagged them using MusicBrainz Picard, using this naming script:

$if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)/ $if($ne(%albumartist%,),%album%$if(%originaldate%, \($left(%originaldate%,4)\),%originaldate%)/)$if($gt(%totaldiscs%,1),%discnumber%)$num(%tracknumber%,2) - %title%

They seem to look good in Picard.

Let’s confirm that tags all look proper in another app like Apple Music. Looks good to me, including the Album Artist being ‘Various Artists’ as per Plex’s documentation.

They are organized in folders as such (maybe the extra folder of “Ultra-Lounge” is the culprit, but I don’t see how).

When playing them in Plex(!) they appear to have all proper meta info in all the right fields, no mention of Bob Marley anywhere.

Now here’s the weird thing, clicking on the artist name, Martin Denny in this case, redirects to… Bob Marley??? And it even includes some other ‘Various Artists’ mismatches from other albums/soundtracks.

What on earth is happening here? Where is this coming from and how do I fix it? I’m at my wit’s end.

[jimbob100101]

That extra folder probably is the culprit unfortunately

[OttoKerner]

Pretty much all cases of this that I’ve seen can be traced back to a mismatch between the AlbumArtist meta tag and the storage location of the album with that meta tag in a wrong Artist folder.
Even a single wrong (or missing) album artist tag can poison all albums which are stored inside the same artist folder.

This can even continue to affect your library if you have rectified the above mismatch afterwards.
You still may have to Plex dance all involved album artists and their respective albums.

@jimbob100101

That extra folder probably is the culprit

Not in my experience, not at all.

[dmurph]

Thanks for the response! Trying to wrap my head around what this means and where to look. As it’s ‘Bob Marley’ that’s popping up where it shouldn’t, are you saying that it’s likely one of his tracks that’s ‘poisoning the well’, so to speak?

I definitely have a lot of ooooooold tracks in the main library folder that need some tag fixing, but I’d like to get this particular issue sorted before moving on if I can.

[dmurph]

@jimbob100101

That extra folder probably is the culprit unfortunately

Alas, I did try getting things out of there after posting, but to no effect.

[anon5074910]

Do you have “Prefer local metadata” enabled on your music library ? Did not see it called out in your post.

Also, if you updated the tags AFTER plex initially scanned them then a plex dance will be needed to get them cleaned up and scanned correctly again.

[OttoKerner]

Verify that all albums (or more precisely: all tracks inside a certain album) have an AlbumArtist metatag present, and that it has the same content on all tracks of one and the same album.

Then sort the albums according to the AlbumArtist tags into your folder structure.
If you use mp3tag or similar software, you can even automate this.

/Music
   /AlbumArtist 1
      /Album 1
      /Album 2
      ...
   /AlbumArtist 2
      /Album 1
      /Album 2
      ...
   ...

Sampler Albums and Compilations/Soundtracks must adhere to this rule as well!
The AlbumArtist for samplers is usually named Various Artists. All albums tagged with it must therefore go into an Artist folder named

/Music
   /Various Artists
      /Sampler Album 1
      /Sampler Album 2
      ...

The only exceptions are albums which can be attributed to one known artist, which can play the role as AlbumArtist. Like e.g. soundtracks by Hans Zimmer, or mix albums by a certain DJ.
But these exceptions then must go into their own artist folders, they must not remain in the Various Artists folder with all the other samplers/soundtracks.

[dmurph]

@anon5074910

Do you have “Prefer local metadata” enabled on your music library ? Did not see it called out in your post.

Oh, I don’t think I checked that! I’ll take a look, thanks!

[dmurph]

Fantastic! Thank you for breaking this down! I’m going to try and get to this over the weekend and report back here for posterity and anyone else who may need it in the future.