Well, my music library (80 000 tracks) in Plex is a mess… The compilations are especially all over the place. I know for a fact that the tags of the files are correct, I tagged everything with Picard and Tagscanner. Some compilations have the album artist tag filled, some don’t.
I’ve come to understand that Plex doesn’t work well with empty album artist tag and doesn’t care about the compilation tag used by iTunes. Annoying, but ok.
However even my compilations which have an “album artist” tag are extremely messy. Here’s an example out of (too) many: all the tracks have the same album artist tag, “Songs: Ohia”, and my understanding is that they should all appear as one album. Yet each track appears as a different album. And when I change the album artist for each track individually, I have multiple choices possible, all with the same “Songs: Ohia” name.
I also have a slightly different problem that makes even less sense: some compilation tracks with an album artist tag are tagged in Plex under a different artist which doesn’t even have a single track on the compilation. Example here.
How can I fix that, apart from changing the tag track by track, which is unfeasable?
I waited like 3 weeks to have the sonic analysis done, so starting anew isn’t an appealing option…
However even my compilations which have an “album artist” tag are extremely messy. Here ’s an example out of (too) many
Multi-select all those 1-track albums in Album view, and click More > Merge. It will be one album again. Why this happens, who knows - the scanner is a bit of a black box.
I also have a slightly different problem that makes even less sense: some compilation tracks with an album artist tag are tagged in Plex under a different artist which doesn’t even have a single track on the compilation.
Yes this has been a weird bug for a few years now (I think it started with the switch to the “new” Plex Music scanner?). Compilations are scanned correctly for a while, but at some point in time, the scanner loses the plot and starts applying a seemingly random artist as Album Artist for each new compilation it encounters.
The way to fix it temporarily is to carefully fix the albums (go to that “wrong” artist, multi-select all affected albums, Edit, change to “Various Artists”, and Refresh Metadata), and then do Settings > Troubleshooting > Optimize Database. With the rebuilt database, the scanner will then behave normally, for a while.
Yeah it has nothing to do with the tags, it’s the scanner. Basically, keep an eye out for when it happens again, then you can immediately take action before the backlog of wrongly scanned albums gets too big.
