I have a number of CDs and DVDs loaded with various songs by various Artists…
I want to add each Discs to their individual folders on my Linux Server … and keep the individual songs organized per folder as they are on their respective CDs …
So I labeled each folder VariousArtists - and have quite a number of these folders in a folder called Various Artist … on the server …
The format looks like …
media/music/variousartists/variousartists-
01 - song1
02 - song2
…
50 - song50
And I browse to this folder in Plex… adding the library … Yet the PMS does not pick up any of the music nor the CD/DVD folder …
Make sure your files have embedded meta tags.
Use file formats from which Plex can read embedded meta tags (e.g. no .wav files).
All files within one sampler album must have identical content in the ‘Album Artist’ and ‘Album Title’ meta tags.
The content of the ‘Album Title’ and the ‘Album Artist’ tags must mirror the folder names.
The ‘Track #’ tag must be populated as well.
If the sampler has more than one disc, populate the ‘Disc #’ tag accordingly.
TL;DR it is the exact same as for regular albums. Just that the ‘Album Artist’ is named “Various Artists”
And since you mentioned Linux: make sure that plex has access permissions to these files and folders.
If you happen to have ‘Prefer local metatags’ activated in your music library, there is an additional trap:
Look up all your albums at musicbrainz.org, under which ‘Album Artist’ this album has been filed.
Some assumed ‘Various Artists’ albums are actually filed under a different Album Artist. This happens often with Original Soundtrack releases of movies and musicals.
If you find that one album was filed not as ‘Various Artists’, remove it from the /Various Artists folder and put it into an own folder, named after the ‘Album Artist’ from musicbrainz.
Change the embedded metatags accordingly.
If you fail to do so, you may find that your whole Artist category has been renamed in Plex to one of the deviant Album Artists.
I tried the folder arrangement that you suggested and same problem…Plex does not see the Music …
Most of the files are mp3 and some m4a … there are no wav
files … Not sure about metadata … But a good bit of this music
goes back to early 2000 …
I took a quick check of folders stemming back to my /home and all folders down to the music folder are 755 …
Also the Movie folder precedes the Music folder and Plex picks up the movies just fine… So I am thinking that Plex is looking for something particular … And hope not to have check every song on every CD for Album, Artist, Track info … and simply track number and title the song…
, for example, “01 - Can’t Get Enough”
Plex picks up the Album Music that I have … finds the album covers and fills in other details … And If I have more than one Album by the same artists it will collect the Albums belonging to the Artist so that I simply select the artist from the Album tag on the left column …
In this case I have collection of CDs with assorted music … CDs that I have either made or been given … and each CD is named something like “Tonights the Nite”, or “Dancers Delight”, etc… and I would like to keep these names … if Plex will allow …
enable ‘Prefer local metatags’ (caution, this may affect your other music as well)
curate the embedded meta tags carefully, to provide Plex with all necessary data to build a custom album. I outlined all of it above.
If your files don’t have any embeded tags or only a few: there is software which can use clues from the file and folder names to fill in the meta tags.
