Back in June, I downloaded my Google Play Music library in anticipation of the upcoming demise of the service. This provided me with a very nicely organized folder structure of all of my music, Artist > Album > Track. I recently began using MP3Tag to integrate the remaining MP3s that I’ve downloaded in the intervening time. Everything that came from Google Play Music and everything that I have downloaded since has full ID3v2.3 tagging, complete with track name, artist name, and (in most cases) album artist name (as well as the other things like genre, track number, year, etc.).
I have found an issue with a number of tracks where they appear to have a blank track title in Plex. I cannot discern the root cause of this.
In this example, you can see that there are a few tracks that have blank titles.
Homing in on the Jon Bellion tracks, you can see that in MP3Tag, they have all of the metadata complete. And yet, Plex sees Various artist somewhere for the Artist field (for all of them, not just the one with Travis Mendes). I don’t see anything that I could possibly fix…
The last thing I did last night was start a Refresh All Metadata scan of my library. Checking again this morning, I see no change in the tags of these songs.
Is there a setting set wrong somewhere? Is this a bigger issue with my tagging? Is this a Plex bug?
I don’t know if it’s a Plex bug or a process issue, but after a recent update the exact same thing has happened to me. And other strange things, like an album of material showing up 11 times with one song under each. Have spent a lot of time and computing trying to somehow hit upon a solution but nothing has worked.
After receiving a number of suggestions elsewhere, I worked on a solution that centered around the ID3 tagging of MP3s in my library.
Someone suggested it was possible that tracks with both ID3v1 and ID3v2.3 tags were only having the v1 tags read by Plex (as though there was some preference for v1 over v2.3). It was suggested that I use MP3Tag and filter those tracks and remove the ID3v1 tag from them.
After doing so, I toggled off and then on the Prefer local metadata setting on the library and ran a Refresh All Metadata scan.
A side goal of my migration of music was to copy a playlist from Google Play Music to Plex. It is a running playlist of songs that I continuously add on to the end, and it has over 700 songs at this point.
Using a python script found here, I had been previously able to get it to find 244/723 tracks from the playlist. After the change, it was able to get 227. Looks like there was ultimately an adverse effect.
Overall, I’m not sure what it is that Plex doesn’t like about the songs that it will not name them in the media manager.
I have exactly the same problem, but for me removing ID3v1 didn’t help… so I am stuck now. Whole collections are showing only artist names.
Weird thing is the first CD in collection is fully tagged with ID3v1 and v2 and is showing like it should and also shows cover/folder.jpg automatically.
Another point is only those samplers are showing right that are found on Musicbrainz db!!! For me it’s eg “Tanecni liga 1” and “Tanecni liga 15”. Everything inbetween is messed up.
I had this same issue and finally solved on my own it after many threads here with Plex people, etc.
I would upload an album, it would sometimes show the info if I refreshed the metadata and then later it would mysteriously disappear, or the opposite (it would be there until the next album caused a refresh, and then all the track info, etc disappeared), or sometimes it would just never be there at all.
In my case, I discovered on my own that there were two set of settings that were competing with each other that both control metadata (one set of settings under the music library “…” and one in the Settings under Agents (advanced):
When I first saw the settings for the library, I realized they were the opposite of what the agents were, so I changed them to what you see now above for all three screenshots.
Once I did that, I had to MOVE or COPY/DELETE the content off my WD PR4100 and then copy/move it back, and then it finally saw the correct metadata and it stayed. Just trying to fix the settings and then scan in place resulted in duplicate albums/songs pointing to the same files, etc…it was a big mess. Easier to just move and move back.
Now everything has been all set since I did that with music, track names, covers, etc.
This bug absolutely infuriates me. I think I’ve found a workaround, but it’s a pain in the butt, and clearly a big.
It should be clear that the problem isn’t related to whether the metadata tags are ID3v1 or ID3v2. That’s because
When the album is first discovered by PMS, it does read the data correctly. It only forgets later.
Even after it forgets, there is some metadata that remains. The track title is gone, but I can see that when the track Artist is different from the album Artist, it still remembers the track Artist.
It seems that the problem occurs when the album doesn’t get matched properly when scanned into the library. (This is unfortunately very common for me, since most of what I listen to are relative obscure prog-rock stuff.)
So after you add an album to your library, go back and check to see if it matched by clicking its menu and seeing if “Match…” is shown. If so, click that, and then in the Match dialog, click the Auto Match dropdown and select “Personal Media Artists”.
I haven’t proven this definitively, but this seems to work to ensure that the album’s track titles are not later forgotten.
But did you try my work-around (manually Match, and tell it to use “Personal Media Artists”)? I’m not confident that this permanently fixes the album, but it certainly does at least in the short term, with 100% success for me.
I did try your work around which was appreciated, thanks.
In the latest version of Plex Media Server (Version 1.21.0.3616-d87012962) Personal Media Artists is no longer listed; only LastFM or Plex.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work for me. There’s something not right and I’ve not been able to work out why song titles for certain albums or tracks are suddenly becoming blank. This doesn’t seem to be on Plex’s radar which is a real shame.
It finds the album, and the song titles are listed when I manually search using Plex Music, but when I click on the album, the titles have gone.
I can confirm that this wasn’t the issue as I had been told. I have added some new tracks to my library since I completed the migration, and I have not cleared the ID3v1 tags. They still populate in my Plex library just fine.
The issue that I have not been able to resolve (haven’t really tried, to be honest), is that the Artist field remains blank, no matter what I do. The Track title issue was solved when I scrolled through my entire 10,000 song music library and hit Refresh Metadata on the album for any song that had a blank track title. But the Artist field, which is certainly recorded just fine, doesn’t populate in Plex for some songs. This would be problematic if I wanted to search or sort by that field, but for now, I’m just going to move on to other projects and hope that there’s some progress in time.
A problem like this means the programmers are incompetent and the software is just poor quality. I mean really what music server shows blank titles? How hard is that to fix?
