Batch editing tracks in a music playlist

[Crumnut]

Hello! This is my first time using the forums, so apologies if I’m in the wrong place.

I’ve been using Plex for maybe a year or two now and I love it! I have built my film and tv libraries from the ground-up with Plex in mind and it handles them great.
As for music, I already had a very large music collection organised in iTunes for many years prior, so naturally I just pointed Plex at my already set-up music library.

The trouble is, iTunes has always been quite bad with things like genre tags- if something has multiple genres, say, “techno, klezmer, ambient, blues”, it wouldn’t list the record under each of those genre tags but put it in it’s own genre called “techno, klezmer, ambient, blues” which would only have one album in it.
So for years, I’ve been stripping genres away from the metadata, and using playlists to manage everything. I have playlists for genres, countries, record labels, decades, LPs/EPs/singles, etc. Most of them aren’t playlists in the sense that I would hit shuffle and listen to everything in them, it’s just as a way to browse through and find albums.

I’ve managed to import these playlists to Plex, but Plex doesn’t handle playlists quite the same way- it handles them like playlists that you put on and shuffle. But it DOES have tags for genres and collections and the like which could do exactly what I want, and are probably a better system than hundreds of playlists.

SO, I need to translate these playlists into tags so I can navigate my enormous music library. But in Plex I can only view playlists as tracks, and don’t have the option of selecting and editing multiple tracks within them. In library view I can’t seem to filter the library by playlist either.
I’m aware that the problem partially lies with playlists are built to manage tracks and genre tags only apply to albums (which is fine to me, the playlists I want to replace with tags were used to organise whole albums, not tracks). If I could just figure out a way of batch-editing these albums ONCE to apply the tag I could then delete the playlist forever.

I’m also unable to figure this out at the iTunes end of the sequence. I COULD select everything within an iTunes playlist and apply a genre tag which would then be written to the file’s metadata, which Plex could use instead of a playlist xml. But for each playlist an album appears in, that batch edit completely overwrites any genres already there, so I don’t even have the option of making genres called “techno, klezmer, ambient, blues” in iTunes and splitting them into separate tags in Plex.

Does anyone have an idea on how to fix this? Or am I going about this completely the wrong way? Thank you in advance!!!

[bpogue99]

You might try out MP3Tag (https://www.mp3tag.de/en/) as it can manipulate thousands of tags on media files. If you get in to managing the folder structures, you could try out Filebot (https://www.filebot.net/).

[Crumnut]

Thank you so much for your suggestion! I had not even considered using a third software as a middle man.

My Plex server and music library both run off a Mac, so I found a similar program for Mac called Yate which is working great! I can drag whole playlists from iTunes onto it, write the tag and save it.

Writing a new genre tag overwrites existing ones, but once you drag a playlist in you can sort by genre, select any tracks that already have a genre listed, and format it as “genre 1\genre 2”. Plex seemed to understand this formatting fine and splits it into separate tags.

From doing this I’ve realised you might be able to do a similar thing directly in iTunes, but the Yate interface makes it considerably faster, and allows you to write to other tags such as “mood” which iTunes doesn’t let you use, but Plex does.