An Artist totally missing from Music collection.

General Discussions
1

I have 440+ folders in music and more than 7000 songs - a life long collection of my wife and I. I noticed this evening that the Red Hot Chili Peppers are not showing up the the music, I just added the new album I downloaded along with my tickets to a concert we bought.

I haven’t the time to check right now, but I assume there must be others missing. How do I go about trouble shooting this?

Honestly, for at least a dozen reasons I can think of, the music part of Plex is very alpha stage. Just my opinion, but frankly it’s way past time to spend some hours getting the music player part of Plex up to par with the video. The interface is really awful in a lot of ways, but at least it should show all my music. This is the only area that I am disappointed with Plex.

2

Check the sort order. It be sorted by Red and you are looking under The, or sorted by The, and you are looking at Red. Mine is named Red and sorted by Red.

Another thing to try is searched for Red.

3

Check the permissions on your new music files. Nearly every time, when I add a new album and Plex doesn’t find it, it’s because Linux sets default permissions that don’t allow Plex to see it.

4

Thanks guys,

File permissions aren’t the issue Beckfield, you can control how your server assigns permissions. I’ve been a Linux user for 15+ years. Seriously, if you want help with that message me - I’ll help you get yours working properly.

Phillid2, neither is sort order. I played with that once I discovered this issue. I even managed to get the web app to reverse sort even though I didn’t ask for that. Did I mention the music interface is awful?

I did a search in plex on the web app and found all six RHCP albums in V under “Various Artists”. It seems dozens of artists in my collection are relegated to not being important enough to deserve their own listing???

So I guess I need to figure out how to get Plex to not shove so many into “those who shall not be named” category. I would hate to have to enter all the info manually. All the file tags are correct. Any suggestions? Can I just delete them from the library and then re-scan it without wiping the entire database?

5

OMG, I just did a “Fix Match” of the RHCP folder and it came up with Ramones. Something is seriously wrong here.

6

OK more info: Six albums all with the correct tags (Album Artist = Red Hot Chili Peppers) but ONE file from a “Various Artists” album in the folder is from a tribute to the Ramones and the entire RHCP collection is listed as Various Artists and Match finds Ramones. I’m sorry, but this is a really dumb way to handle music files. I either have to separate the RHCP songs into “Albums only by the band” and “Songs from other albums”. Are we supposed to have one giant folder with everything in it or a separate folder for each song? Dumb, really dumb.

7

So I moved the offending file out of the RCHP folder (even though it is a song by RHCP - dumb) and still the 5 other albums are listed as Various Artists. This really is ridiculous.

8

So moving the entire RHCP folder off the server and then refresh all, then moving it back on, then refresh all again seems to at least have that one band properly listed.

Why don’t the Plex developers let us decide how to sort music by reading the ID3 Tags?

10

Thank you for your reply to all my whining… :slight_smile:

First, My music is MOSTLY filed/foldered that way except for non-album tracks. What do I do with those? My habit has been to keep those individual tracks under the Artists folder but without a specific Album folder. This must be part of what’s causing what see. I’ll work on this and see if it helps. What do I do with promo tracks and mixed-tracks?

Next, ALL my files are correctly tagged, including cover art, except for a very few I have not been able to find in MusicBrainz Picard. I use MusicBrainz Picard and puddletag to properly define and tag all of them and embedded tags are enabled in Plex. In the case of the mixed folders, it appears Plex ignores the tags. In my example above, 1 song tagged “Various Artists” for Album Artist caused every song in all the subfolders to be tagged as Various Artists even though they were properly tagged as RHCP. Clearly, some things override the tags. I would describe this as a bug. If I tag my files, my media player should honor my tags, regardless of what it “thinks” about them - even if they’re wrong.

The unanswered question is why can’t I get a rescan to have any effect unless I delete the mis-labeled tracks and restore them? Seems like I should be able to do this.

11

@oshunluvr said:
Thank you for your reply to all my whining… :slight_smile:

First, My music is MOSTLY filed/foldered that way except for non-album tracks. What do I do with those? My habit has been to keep those individual tracks under the Artists folder but without a specific Album folder.

This is correct, AFAIK. If these tracks are tagged, make sure they don’t contain an album tag and that their ‘AlbumArtist’ is either filled correctly with the Artist name or un-set.
That way, Plex assembles these album-less tracks under the virtual album [Unknown Album], within the AlbumArtist.

Next, ALL my files are correctly tagged, …
Clearly, some things override the tags. I would describe this as a bug. If I tag my files, my media player should honor my tags, regardless of what it “thinks” about them - even if they’re wrong.

If that is the case, you might wanna instruct Plex to give your metadata priority over the information from Gracenote. Gracenote has a tendency to assign album-less tracks to a sampler album/Various Artists.

Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - Premium Music
as well as
Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - last.fm
grab the line ‘Local Media Assets’ and move it into the top position.
That way local metadata and local/embedded cover art take priority.

In the case of a Premium Music library there is an additional check box to be filled:
edit your music library, go to the ‘Advanced’ tab and check ‘Use embedded tags’

The unanswered question is why can’t I get a rescan to have any effect unless I delete the mis-labeled tracks and restore them? Seems like I should be able to do this.

This is a birth defect of Plex. It only reads tags (mostly) when the media are added for the first time. If you edit meta tags later or rename files and folders, Plex will re-cognise the file with a (kind of) checksum but won’t consider the changes.

To overcome this, we use a procedure we call the Plex Dance. With music, you can omit step 4 of the dance.

some more tips for handling music in Plex
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1093611/#Comment_1093611
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1050849/#Comment_1050849

12

Hey, thanks again, however, the “Plex Dance” didn’t work for me. Nothing got removed after moving the files and running Update. I ended up just deleting the the Library and re-building it. More of a “Nuclear Option” but got the job done. I found I had more mis-labeled than I thought so I only moved back the one that were correct. Now I just need to take the time to correctly folder-ize and name all the files correctly.

13

@oshunluvr said:
File permissions aren’t the issue Beckfield, you can control how your server assigns permissions. I’ve been a Linux user for 15+ years. Seriously, if you want help with that message me - I’ll help you get yours working properly.
I appreciate the offer, but I figured it out eventually. :blush:
Thanks.

Glad you got yours going, though I’m surprised the Dance didn’t work. It’s really not much different than deleting the library and starting a new one.

14

@beckfield ; yeah maybe I wasn’t patient enough, but I got it done. I had actually already moved all the offending (improperly configured folders or mis-tagged files) to a holding location. Then I just logged into the server, killed plex, unmounted the music folder (I store each media type in a separate BTRFS subvolume on my server), restarted plex, deleted the Music library, remounted the music folder, and added the library back in. Whole operation took like 3 minutes - not including rebuilding the library of course. It already looks better but I got some work ahead of me to finalize the remaining files correctly. I can’t decide if I want to create folders for every song, or use the “Unknown album” option. I’m OCD enough I will likely make all the folders :wink:

P.S. If you ever are looking for Linux help, I hang out on G+ and at kubuntuforums.net and on IRC freenode at #kubuntu and #kde-neon. I’ve been a daily Linux user for 15+ years.

15

What I typically do is import a CD into iTunes to edit the metadata. Once it is cleaned up there, it makes importing into Plex much smoother. I also lost artists due to bad metadata.

16

This is correct, AFAIK. If these tracks are tagged, make sure they don’t contain an album tag and that their ‘AlbumArtist’ is either filled correctly with the Artist name or un-set.
That way, Plex assembles these album-less tracks under the virtual album [Unknown Album], within the AlbumArtist.

So I tested this, but it’s not working as described - at least not here. All the settings are as suggested above but Plex separates them into their Albums anyway and seems to get the date and covers wrong. I cleared the Album tag and left the other alone. I may try this again clearing more of the tags - all that have anything to do with album - or maybe just do them all the preferred way.

17

@oshunluvr said:
So I tested this, but it’s not working as described - at least not here. All the settings are as suggested above but Plex separates them into their Albums anyway and seems to get the date and covers wrong

This sounds as if your agent settings are still not as advised above.
Did you create a Premium Music library or a ‘conventional’ one, when you erased and recreated the library?

18

Premium.

I tested this again with another artist. I took a partially tagged file (no release date) and moved it into the artist folder with no sub folder. It picked up everything from the file tags and left the date blank. I did the Plex Shuffle with it and then I added the missing tag. It labeled the album and artist and date correctly and used the embedded cover in the file. I don’t know why the files I tried this with before acted differently - likely the Album tags weren’t fully cleared as suggested.

So it appears to be working as described except for the (Unknown Album) thing but that is likely a problem on my end. I use MusicBrainz Picard to create and scrape the tags from the internet and it seems to be preventing me from removing the Album information completely. I find Plex is behaving OK in this situation. As long as I have the file tagged correctly and Plex uses the tags, I’m good with letting it identify the album from the tags without having to sub-folder every individual song. Since the vast majority of our music is full CD’s anyway it’s not that big of a deal to fix those few that go astray.

In any case, it appears my initial primary issue (my entire RHCP collection mis-filed) was caused by having a song from a “Various Artists” compilation in the Artist folder in with the full albums when the folder was initially scanned. For some reason, all the subsequent songs were also tagged as Various Artists. This is simple enough to avoid by not doing that again.

Thanks for your help and persistence Otto, you clearly are a “Plex Ninja” :smiley: