Various Artists? No, it's not!

Support
1

I have this one album that has be baffled.

The Commodores 14 Greatest Hits from 1983 (in 320 kbps MP3 form).

Both Foobar2000 and my iPhone see this as being a compilation, and lists Various Artists as the artist.

MP3 tag lists The Commodores in every artist field.

I've tried clearing the artist field, saving the files, re-entering the artist, but that does nothing.

Is there some super secret hidden switch telling my audio players this is a compilation? Can I fix this?

2

Could be the AlbumArtist field is set to Various Artists? Or the Compilation field is set to 1?

3

Please note that you have to fill both: ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST to get the tracks grouped together properly.

4

MY fix was something I've never done before, and I've used MP3Tag for . . . twenty years?

I used it to remove all tags from the entire album. Then I recreated tags from filenames. Whatever was hidden in the metadata that I could not see was erased, and now everything sees the entire album as being by the Commodores. No more various artists nonsense.

5

And what is now different in the files?

6

Only speculating what could have been the issue for 0LD3_DUDE from my own experience.

I had a similar issue with some albums showing up as Various Artists in Plexamp. The Artist & AlbumArtist tags were setup correctly. I discovered these particular files also had a tag called Album Artist (has a space between the two words) that either had Various Artists or something different to the AlbumArtist tag. Example:

AlbumArtist: Accept
Album Artist: Acccept

Any discrepancy between the 2 fields would cause Various Artists to be shown in the Plexamp.