I’m an editor on MusicBrainz and I have noticed that if a relationship link to allmusic does not exist for a performer, Plex seems to check allmusic anyway with a simple text search, and choose the exact name match.
This obviously opens up some false positives, but I understand the decision for it.
But, the problem is that Plex does not seem to follow the proper link on MusicBrainz if it exists.
A good example is the very big kpop group “bigbang”. Allmusic has them listed as “big bang” with a space, and they also have a norwegian rock band “bigbang”. I have myself added the allmusic link “big bang” on MusicBrainz for the kpop group but Plex keeps insisting on getting the info for the norwegian band.
I think Plex should follow the link if it is there, as it does with lastfm. Is this a bug?
Bump. This is kind of an annoying bug because it causes a complete loss of “radio metadata” for such an artist. I mean things that power your radios. Similar artists, styles, moods.
A new example is Russian band Аркона. They have lots of info on allmusic but there they are entered under the translated name Arkona.
On MusicBrainz they are properly named Аркона and they are linked to allmusics Arkona. But Plex will not get metadata for them because it seems to not parse that link.
I think Plex should follow the link if it is there, as it does with lastfm. Is this a bug?
I tend to do bits on the musicbrainz to last.fm side of things as well and have noticed that for the past 2 months the last.fm link isn’t working either. Leaving alot of artists who aren’t blessed with an allmusic bio with holes in my collection in terms of metadata
I do appreciate it’s really hard for the Plex scanner to successfully match four different sources (the embedded tag, musicbrainz, allmusic and last.fm) flawlessly, especially with so many artists with ‘variable’ spelling (Is it KC & The Sunshine Band or K.C. And The Sunshine Band? Zoviet France or :zoviet*france:?), name changes during their career (The Jackson Five -> The Jacksons, Weyes Bluhd -> Weyes Blood, Young Jeezy ->Jeezy), transliterated different alphabets (the Аркона example above), different naming conventions (eg Japanese artists: Ryuichi Sakamoto or Sakamoto Ryuichi?).
That said, the Plex UI doesn’t really make it easy to manually input last.fm id’s, allmusic id’s and mbid’s.
Well previously I was told that it would only look at musicbrainz, and then match against other sources in the musicbrainz relationship table. As a result, I’ve been adding last.fm links to the artists with no biography data in my collection in musicbrainz. It used to take a month for those changes to take effect, but this seems to be broken now. I have around 100 entries now in my collection with absolutely no biography or top track data
I do wholeheartedly agree that I would love the option to just manually match against a metadata provider to fill in missing details
Ah yes, that would make sense. But if I’m not mistaken, Plex caches the musicbrainz db on their servers in order to lower the load on musicbrainz (same with imdb, etc), it seems like they don’t update these snapshots very often? Or does PMS not store the ‘refreshed’ data?
Ah! That might explain the monthly cycle it takes for last.fm relationships to show up, assuming that’s done as a monthly task. Anyone from plex able to confirm that? If so, is there anything up with getting the last.fm/allmusic relationships at the moment?
