Audio Metadata Scanning

General Discussions
1

I have a large number of audio albums in .wav (no meta data) format. Despite being meticulous about building a folder tree / file name that Plex is supposed to understand:

<artist> / <album artist> - < album name> / <track artist - track album> - <track number> - <track name>.wav

Most of the time Plex insists on putting the album in Various Artists in various forms. Usually the album is complete (with cover art) and I just have to edit the album artist to get it to be filed properly. Sometimes tracks are grouped together (again with proper cover art) and I have to edit each one. Other times every track is separate under Unknown Album. It seems to be totally random what happens.

I’ve tried making sure the agents are ordered properly, with and without using local data to no effect. There’s a lot of manual effort needed to fix these. Any way to tell Plex to just use the file tree?

2

The structure prescribed in the Help documentation is:

Music/ArtistName - AlbumName/TrackNumber - TrackName.wav

Note that the artist name is not in the filename. See if that works any better.

3

I’m curious, how would that work in a “Various Artists” compilation album, if your files had no metadata? I have only flac and MP3, so it isn’t critical to me, just wondering if there is an alternate naming scheme that would work in this case.

4

I can’t find the post I saw that had the file naming scheme I was following, but I assumed that was why they made a point of using the album artist (Various Artists) as a folder name and the track artist in the file name.

My preference is to use folders for organizing artists and albums, and then step down to compilation/soundtrack name, then down to individual tracks.

5

Yeah, I had the same thought, but I don’t know. My music is also flac/mp3, heavily tagged, and Plex is set to prefer local metadata. So I’ve never had to deal with that situation depending on the folder structure.

6

Nope. Just tried

Music / Harry Chapin / The Gold Collection / <track number> - <track name>

Plex placed all the files under Various Artists. The disc number, track number, track name, album covert art and album text description are all fine. Just the album artist is hosed.
The XML is

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<MediaContainer size="1" allowSync="1" identifier="com.plexapp.plugins.library" librarySectionID="5" librarySectionTitle="Music" librarySectionUUID="6ca29020-9f03-4531-8c63-3e47175b5319" mediaTagPrefix="/system/bundle/media/flags/" mediaTagVersion="1576270308">
<Track ratingKey="14824" key="/library/metadata/14824" parentRatingKey="14823" grandparentRatingKey="11722" guid="plex://track/5d07cdd9403c640290f85fee" parentGuid="plex://album/5d07c3cf403c6402909a2062" grandparentGuid="plex://artist/5d07bbfc403c6402904a5ec9" type="track" title="Taxi" grandparentKey="/library/metadata/11722" parentKey="/library/metadata/14823" librarySectionTitle="Music" librarySectionID="5" librarySectionKey="/library/sections/5" grandparentTitle="Various Artists" parentTitle="The Gold Medal Collection" summary="" index="1" parentIndex="1" thumb="/library/metadata/14823/thumb/1582051494" art="/library/metadata/11722/art/1582051486" parentThumb="/library/metadata/14823/thumb/1582051494" grandparentThumb="/library/metadata/11722/thumb/1582051486" grandparentArt="/library/metadata/11722/art/1582051486" duration="403067" addedAt="1582051398" updatedAt="1582051494">
<Media id="14603" duration="403067" bitrate="1411" audioChannels="2" audioCodec="pcm" container="wav" audioProfile="pcm_s16le">
<Part accessible="1" exists="1" id="15715" key="/library/parts/15715/1582050743/file.wav" duration="403067" file="/volume1/Media/Music/Harry Chapin/The Gold Medal Collection/1-01 - Taxi.wav" size="71101622" audioProfile="pcm_s16le" container="wav">
<Stream id="36120" streamType="2" selected="1" codec="pcm" index="0" channels="2" bitrate="1411" profile="pcm_s16le" samplingRate="44100" displayTitle="Unknown (PCM Stereo)" />
</Part>
</Media>
<Mood id="8387" filter="mood=8387" tag="Bittersweet" />
<Mood id="14575" filter="mood=14575" tag="Complex" />
<Mood id="8238" filter="mood=8238" tag="Dramatic" />
<Mood id="8232" filter="mood=8232" tag="Earnest" />
<Mood id="8441" filter="mood=8441" tag="Earthy" />
<Mood id="15223" filter="mood=15223" tag="Eccentric" />
<Mood id="14572" filter="mood=14572" tag="Elaborate" />
<Mood id="14573" filter="mood=14573" tag="Epic" />
<Mood id="14130" filter="mood=14130" tag="Gutsy" />
<Mood id="8793" filter="mood=8793" tag="Literate" />
<Extras size="0">
</Extras>
</Track>
</MediaContainer>
7

Is that a disc number before the track number? That can screw Plex up too, I think. Can you move the tracks into /disc# subfolders?

8

Unfortunately, that made no difference. Tried it with a single disc album for a different artist with no disc number in the file name. Plex grouped all tracks into a single album, found the cover art and stuffed it into Various Artists.

9

And one more data point - It seems when this happens, although Plex finds the album cover art, it can’t find any poster art. This even after the artist is manually entered and metadata refreshed.

10

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