Hi, Very new to this so if i muck up what I’m trying to say i apologize in advance.
I have a Plex amp server, and I’m using MusicBrainz picard to sort my folders which has been amazing.
the only issue i have is i have a lot of Various Artist tags.
what I’m after is a code so that even if it is listed under various artists, i can still see the artists own tile when i search artists.
an example is “The Wombats” i have a song from them in a compilation of "various Artists, but in the main section where all artists are listed they don’t have there own tile.
is there anyway to have both? or just the actual artist and not various artist in your artists list?
I’m not familiar with Plex, but surely they have seperate fields for Album Artist and Artist (i.e. track artist)? that would be the first place I’d look for a solution (and Picard should set those tags properly, as long as it’s entered correctly in MusicBrainz)
do you have a MusicBrainz link to one of the various artist releases in question?
I haven’t used my Plex server in a while (I switched to Emby a few years ago), but I would have sworn that Plex had different views for Artists vs. Album Artists. Looking at it now, though, I can’t find it. Maybe it was removed, which would be weird, or my memory is faulty and it never had a track artist view. I know Plex can’t handle tracks with multiple artists (orchestra/conductor, for example). You can search for track artists, but then you’re typing in the name of an artist, so probably not what you need.
You might consider having a look at Emby. It handles this much better than Plex.
Welcome 
is there anyway to have both? or just the actual artist and not various artist in your artists list?
Unfortunately, Plex does not handle files tagged as Various Artists well. The Album Artist field is what it uses to create the primary artist entity, and will try to match albums and tracks to the MusicBrainz entity for this title (Various Artists - MusicBrainz). This works for some, but most find it frustrating when they *know* they have an album by an artist, but can’t find it on the respective artist page in Plex.
What I do is have a script that looks for Various Artists in the albumartist field, then have Picard set it to the first actual credited artist. Note that you will need the Additional Artists Variables plugin for this to work.
$if($eq(%albumartist%,Various Artists),$set(albumartist,%_artists_track_primary_std%)$set(musicbrainz_albumartistid,%_artists_track_primary_id%)$delete(musicbrainz_releasegroupid)))
That should get you something like the following:
Which will force Plex to put the album in the track-level artist’s bucket.
One (logical) caveat is that this will also create an album for each artist listed, so the Album view can look wonky at first as there appears to be “duplicative” albums.
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Awesome! i would normally search for artist over album, so that seems like a small price to pay. i will give this a shot. thank you!
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