Hey! It seems that a later version of PMS has stopped populating the artist’s genre field in a music library based on the genre tags for their respective albums. Artists added before whatever has changed are ok, but anyone new isn’t populating this field
This was previously auto populating based on the genre of the albums, and was really handy (and integral) for auto-playlists to populate based on an artist. Has anything changed or is this a bug?
hmm, i’m trying to remember if we changed anything in this area recently. in general you’d have to look at all albums and somehow merge all the genre tags for the artist and i can’t recall ever doing that (for obvious reasons, it’s not trivial).
A refresh of metadata at the artist level (not the album) always corrects the genres for me
I believe Plex used to refresh the artist metadata immediately after an album was added, and that would automatically update and amalgamate the genres from all of the albums. I recall in release notes for one version of the server something like “do not refresh artist metadata when new album is added” (or something to that affect.)
In any event, I know for the last few months, if you want accurate genres for the artist, you have to manually refresh metadata.
Ahh, that’s good data, actually if you mean from tags. We did make a change to not refresh artist automatically with the album as it was leading to an expensive cascading refresh back down to all albums.
I’ve asked a couple of times, but never got an answer. It doesn’t appear to me that the server updates metadata for the artist during the scheduled maintenance time for the server. If it did, wouldn’t that update have the same affect as manually updating the artist?
The refresh artist trick also works for albums that are matchable but remain unmatched, as I mentioned in this post.
so this particular point is a clever observation—the nightly refresh right now does not do matching/upgrading, but i have a change in the works which will turn that on to do so.
Hmmm… always works for me. I wonder if it’s something in the configuration of the music library. I have mine set up to only use embedded tags. So I have “Prefer local metadata” enabled, and have “Embedded Tags” enabled for genres. Those settings are found in the advanced settings when you edit the library.
I’m probably misinterpreting, but without looking at or trying to decipher logs, a manual refresh seems to work in the opposite order. I’m simply watching the spinning circle on the posters, but it refreshes all of the albums, then refreshes the artist. When done this way, it seems the genres from new albums, or changed genre tags are reflected in the artist genres.
weird. I can change the genre of just one track of one album to something completely different than any other album or track, and when I refresh the artist, it scans the albums and the new genre tag shows up in the artist. Similarly, completely removing a genre from all tracks will remove the genre from the artist upon refresh.
I would try doing the “Plex Dance” for Music with the album. (The clean bundles step can be skipped)
Move the album out of the library, so that Plex can’t see it.
If you have Plex configured to automatically see changes in your library, a trash can will show up on the album in a minute or two. If you don’t have it configured that way you will need to scan the library.
Empty the trash from the library
Put the album back into the library (re-scan if your system does not do it automatically)
