i have been sorting and organizing a music collection i have that i haven’t yet created a library for in plex.
i understand the basic naming convention of Artist–>Album–>discnumbertracknumber - Song Name.mp3
that applies to straight forward albums created by an artist
about 1/2 of my collection consists of albums that are created by a composer, DJ or otherwise an “Album Artist”. these albums contain tracks by various artists.
how can i name/sort/organize those files in such a way that plex will recognize them correctly ? i don’t know if the music database is as extensive and robust as the movie/tv show database and i have some doubts that it will correctly recognize everything i have.
moreover, i have several albums by foreign artists. i decided to rename all those files and enclosing folders with english lettering unicode that is easier to work with in command line rather than pulling up on-screen keyboards to find characters for file names which do not exist on a physical keyboard. in doing this, the artist and album names will more than likely not be recognized by plex. but the metadata/tags within the tracks themselves are actually done in the native language character set for the fields ‘Title’, ‘Artist’, ‘Album’. wondering how plex handles stuff like this.
Unfortunately Plex is stuck in the 2000s when it comes to multiple artist metadata; it’s “album artist” only, single implementation, with a “Various Artists” artist for comps. Your individual artist tags will be visible on the album’s page itself but they won’t show up on searches nor link/be linked to the artist’s page. Collaborative or split albums are stuck either just truncating to the first named artist or having entirely separate ones for each pair.
I think the thread requesting this feature is like six years old now. They are likely too pot-committed to their current database schema to fix this.
The news is better on foreign languages; Plex matches through MusicBrainz and non-Latin titles will often have aliases or pseudo-releases in either transliterated or translated English. I have a big chunk of Japanese music in my collection that I had similarly romanized for ease of maintenance and Plex was surprisingly robust at matching to kanji entries in MusicBrainz. At most you may have to do some “fix match” housekeeping and tell it to select the second or third best option but less than you’d think.
for my music, can i have plex look at song tags as the first source (rather than an online database) ?
many of those compilations are done by a single composer/DJ, so if i tag those songs within a compilation with one album artist … how should i rename the song files and folder ?
for example:
compilation 1
album artist 1
different artists for each song
method 1:
Music/album artist 1/compilation 1/song files
method 2 is the way iTunes (now Apple Music) does it when the option to organize the music is set (the check box called “Keep Music Media folder organized”):
i have the chance to revisit the music collection now (as opposed to years ago) with some tools that let me clean out a lot of the garbage tags that media players have added to them over the years. there are several tags i deleted from music that start with “ITUNES…” that don’t mean anything today and have largely redone tags with the generic/universal tag fields that any media player app can identify easily.
also, and for the most part … i have very few “Protected” songs … those songs which likely wont play outside of Apple Music or Amazon Music Player. 99% of my collection is universally playable content in aac or mp3.
Yes, you can and probably should enable “prefer local metadata” if you’re doing any kind of manual tagging. However Plex will still rely on MusicBrainz matching to populate anything that isn’t dictated by the local data (like album art, for instance, if you don’t have that, or genre tags if you don’t have those).
Filenames don’t matter nearly as much as tags. The primary consideration is not disturbing them once they’re in the Plex library as you’ll get a mess of duplicate entries. Both methods you described should work. I don’t use iTunes but I also have a dedicated “VA” compilation folder and it causes no problems other than those inherent to the single-artist-album limit.
I would recommend using beets or picard to process your music collection, as they use the same metadatabase as Plex, but have more sophisticated/customizable matching (for instance scanning and identifying tracks with zero metadata purely on acoustic signatures), meaning you can let them handle the hard work and they will write mbid tags to your files that Plex can then pick up on for idiot-proof matching once you introduce them there.
for those compilations done by a single composer/DJ, i want to approach those like this:
/Music/Album Artist/Album/discnumbertracknumber - song title.mp3
but there are some other compilations that are similar to Billboard Hits and the like where there is no Album Artist. for those, i was thinking of doing:
/Music/Compilations/Album/discnumbertracknumber - song title.mp3
i don’t think that would be an issue, folders named “VA”, “Various Artists”, “Compilations” obviously are not the names of Artists but they will be present at the same level as Artist folders.
general structure i’m following is according to plex:
/Music/Artist/Album/song
after i’m finished organizing all the single artist albums, just need to take a breather before going into compilations … i have some 250 folders to sort through in there. just want to be absolutely sure i’m approaching it right so i don’t have to revisit/redo in the future.
i also am adding this stuff back into apple music, so that i can sync all of it with my iOS devices. i need to be careful with the mac Music app going and adding garbage tag info or changing my music files. apple tends to implement behind-the-scene stuff that only helps their bottom line and they don’t care how it affects users.
Neither of those should be a issue. I put remix/tribute albums in the artist folder and not the VA folder, as long as you’re fine with them being called the “album artist” and the album showing up on their artist page.
what would happen to my music library’s usefulness if i made all the song files read-only ?
asking this because after spending several weeks sorting and organizing to get the library aligned, i dont want to have to worry about apple music app going behind my back and adding or changing tag info in the existing imported song files.
this organizing and sorting has been labor intensive where its slowed down to a per-album edit of tags, fixing wrong track and disc tagging, renaming album and song tags differently from file names, etc. using mp3tag, subler and apple music concurrently per album is a lot of work.
don’t want to have to do it again, worst case ill have to keep an extra copy of the library stashed somewhere else in its current state, but it’s 120GB.
after finishing up all the sorting and organizing … finally got around to importing the music collection into plex. it’s not as messy as i thought but there are several albums that are flagged as compilations in the song file tags, those show up as separate albums (1 for each song) rather than as combined albums. looks like some more work in plex is going to be needed to get things in order
