"oh, i'll just load this folder into musicbrainz picard so i can see if i can find the rouge id3v2 tag that's causing anything tagged with Various Artists to show up as one random artist in plex"

this folder has approximately 20,000 files in it
and something about macos makes it extra slow at working with my NAS
so yeah, 27 days to apparently process less than a third

(i'm sure it'll speed up once it actually starts processing them, but still)

my most controversial opinion is there is never a valid reason to use "Various Artists" as an album artist name. use the name of the entity that released it, or use the title of the release if it wasnt released by an entity. why the fuck would you want to group every compilation together regardless of whats on them. fucking bullshit standard

also the Album Artist tag should just be called Artist, and what is currently called Artist should be Track Artist. or at least make Album Artist the default sort. why the fuck would you want an album to be split up into multiple artists in your library. why is that every music players default (and often only) artist sort

semi-related: worst part of having a linux phone is not having Black Player EX. best music program i have ever used on any platform. if you use android and have a music collection, i can not recommend the paid version of black player enough. free version is also very good but the paid is so incredibly worth it and the dev deserves all of your money anyways