Looks like it was never fixed. I’m seeing the same exact problem as before; cover art is not displayed on albums that have similar names to others. For example:
All albums are matched, have embedded or sidecar jpg album art and proper metadata. Just seemingly happened at random. I can’t reproduce, but it if it’s anything like before, I could fix the albums by unmatching or doing a Refresh Metadata and that would fix it for a period of time, but would then happen again on its own.
I don’t recall that this was ever fixed. A long while ago I decided to completely bypass the matching logic and therefore provide all my own cover art and artist images.
There’s a bug with regard to doing that bypass which has been ignored from what I can tell — it was easily reproduced. Anyway, if you are interested in the exact sequence I use to create a library that bypasses the Plex matching logic then let me know or track down my other posts.
I’ve been happy to continue using Plex for its other strengths once I figured out how to avoid the matching logic completely since I have a lot of similarly named albums and it doesn’t work, as you know, for those cases.
Oh no! I just checked from my iPhone and all my cover art is 100% correct still (all my own images) and I have tons and tons of similarly named albums.
What version are you running? Tomorrow I will log in via my laptop and report to you the current version that I have.
If a recent update broke it then we should be able to get someone at Plex to isolate the issue and once again allow us to completely manage our own metadata.
Based on your bug report it sounds like you are still using the Plex matching logic — I totally go around using it at all. There is none of this matching and unmatching for me, nothing in my library is ever matched , it’s basically disabled with the method I posted.
You might be referring to something I posted prior to discovering a way to totally bypass Plex matching logic.
If so and you are interested in the total bypass approach then I can message it to you again tomorrow. Apologies if I’m confused, there were about 5 related threads I was posting on before I discovered the work around and haven’t posted much since getting things to work for my case (100% my own images for both artists and albums).
Sure, please do! I’d like to know how you do it. My albums are matched, except for the problem ones that are similar in name to the “main” album. That fixes the issue; I think what happened is that they somehow became matched again, despite me unmatching them.
Interconnect, I would suggest you keep your libraries in place initially and try this method on a new version of one or more of your music libraries to make sure it works for you. You will notice that all artist bio info will be missing from the new library, so I just want to make sure you are aware that you won’t get lyrics, artist bios, etc…
So if you have a library called say “My Music” then just make another library called “My Music 2” and follow these steps.
Create the new music library as usual but when you get to the Advanced page of the new library setup follow these steps:
(1). Make sure to choose Agent = Personal Media Artists as the very first thing you do, this will set the Scanner to Scanner = Plex Media Scanner. If you choose the Scanner first then all bets are off, this is where there appears to be a clear Plex bug but I’ve not been able to find anyone at Plex to look into it.
(2). Make sure to turn on Prefer Local Metadata
(3). Make sure to set Album Art = Local Files Only
I think the other settings don’t impact the cover art situation.
Now, under the Agents section of the settings for the server, set the Albums setting to Local Media Assets at the top of the list with it’s flag turned on. Personal Media Albums second. I have NO idea what these settings mean and I don’t know if they make a difference with regard to cover art, but this is how I have them set.
The artist images must be in the folder that holds the album folders and the file itself must be named “artist.jpg” (or other image extension, but the name of the file must be “artist”)
Thanks @Gretschguy for all the info. I think I’m going to keep mine how it is (unfortunately) because I don’t really want to lose lyrics.
I’m still getting album art disappearing for albums that have similar names (ex. “Voyager” and “Voyager Instrumentals”); I used to be able to resolve it by unmatching the particular affected albums, but now Plex is re-matching the albums on its own. Simply put, they won’t stay unmatched.
This rematching of manually unmatched albums was actually addressed in ver. 1.22.0.4136 on March 2nd:
(Library) Manually unmatched items in Plex Movie libraries would get rematched when refreshing (#12281)
Looks like it is back because I can reproduce the issue; manually unmatching an album results in rematching when PMS does a metadata refresh as part of its scheduled tasks.
The broader issue here is that PMS is apparently not prioritizing local metadata vs. what it’s pulling from its online database. I do in fact have “Prefer Local Metadata” enabled and “Local Media Assets” at the top of the list under Albums in the Agents manager. Cover art is either stored as a “cover.jpg” sidecar file or stored in the files themselves). All metadata is correct. Folder and file structure is like so: Music>Artist Name>Album Name>01. File Name.mp3
@tom80H, @BigWheel and @elan were looking at this before with. Maybe you guys could take another look? I can help and provide whatever you need to resolve this!
Thanks interconnect, I would also like to use the lyrics feature and artist bios at some point so if this ever gets resolved please let me know.
Meanwhile I’ve prioritized having control and consistency on the album art and I’ve been (slowly) filling in the artist artwork. So I’m happy I have at least reached a stable and consistent situation although I did like the lyrics feature.
Some positive news to report, it looks like the fix in 1.24.1.4931 (#12946) has gone a long way to fixing the problems I’ve experienced over the past two years on this!
I’m now able to create Plex libraries finally that respect my own images. I’ve created parallel libraries to my existing “workaround Plex meta” libraries, such as “CDs (Plex Meta)” as a mirror to “CDs”. The daily process is also not clobbering my images and blanking them out for either of the libraries (Plex Metadata or Workaround Plex Meta). The benefit is that these “Plex Meta” libraries have lyrics, artist bios, etc… Which is nice.
I wonder how long the coding fix took, because many of us have spent countless hours over two years talking about these problems and someone probably made some easy fixes I’m guessing which could have saved so much frustration and forum nonsense over the past two years.
I actually personally run a technology company and I have to say, my clients would have killed me if I argued for two years that a problem was “user error” and turned out not to be after I ignored them for two years. This is probably a downside of this Forum approach instead of a legit user support system that dives deep with a user problem to pin down exactly whether it is a bug or user error. This was a great failure of the Plex Forum approach IMHO.
Anyway. someone is actually now in this section of code making fixes! That’s huge news to me.
Can that person reveal themself and we could try to pin down the last mile here of any remaining edge cases like similarly named albums.
@interconnect maybe have faith that there is evidence that someone has accepted the fact that there are bugs in this section of code and has made some fixes that have at least in my case seem to have dramatically helped the situation.
So did you have more than embedded album art image? I only have one for all my albums and some have the image as a sidecar file (all newer albums).
So all you did was just create a new library and it appears to be working Ok? I just created a new test library with just two affected albums from two artists (so four albums total), we’ll see how that goes.
Artist images are standalone images in the directory that holds the albums with title artist.jpg or artist.png
I’m still having some “edge case” issues so far, for example, the rare band “London Synth Orchestra” gets matched to a totally different swing artist called “London Swing Orchestra”. I’m not sure what the intended user procedure is to fix this and force it to use London Synth Orchestra and force me to provide the image of the artist.
Even with my artist image inserted in the directory, I still got the wrong artist name “London Swing Orchestra”
I was able to edit the name of the artist to the proper name manually in Plex but even then the bio keeps going back to the swing band bio when I refresh meta-data.
I have a bunch of these weird “matching” cases, but it may not be so many that I can’t live with it now.
I wish a developer would engage with us directly so we could nail these various issues / cases directly head on.
Which version are you running? I’m on Synology. The big fix seems to have been in 1.24.1.4931 and that was within the last couple weeks I think. So the fix might not have made it to your server yet if you’re not on Synology perhaps.
I’m on 1.24.1 as well. I was trying to make a test library with just a few of the problematic albums and couldn’t. The similar pair of albums would merge into one, despite them being in separate folders. Which should not happen.
Given that you’ve boiled it down to such a simple problem case maybe someone at Plex could now look at it? Is there anyway to determine who did that fix that I referenced?
Meanwhile, can you please explain your folder structure and I will compare it to mine
I’m finding one library is working much better than another with similarly named albums so tomorrow I’m going to drill into the difference in directory structure between those two libraries to see if I can isolate what Plex doesn’t like
I have sent Elan three pair of affected albums; he’s looking into the issue. I tried to make a test library with just a few of the albums in it and wasn’t even able to; a couple of them would merge into one even though the files are in separate folders.
That’s awesome to hear – Elan is great and was hugely helpful on the Plex Amp side of things for me. He took my comments seriously and really tried to help. Very pleased to hear that.
I’m also now having similar problems again, so the fix didn’t completely take for me. In the nightly process something whacks about 5% fo my cover art images, these are almost all similarly named albums, so let’s say I have a large library with 1000 albums and I have 5 versions of some album, today I have a bunch of cases where the process has blanked out say 1 of those 5 albums.
The albums are named differently, such as “Let It Be” and “Let It Be (MFSL)”, and I’m using embedded cover art on them, images may or may not be the same but they are on the files (embdedded).
Let’s hope fixing your problem fixes my problems too!
I’m happy to work with Elan as well to pin down what’s going on with my libraries.
