Hi,
I recently re-tagged a lot of music files (Live albums that had no ID tags among others) that previously were not being picked up by Plex. I ended up deleting and then just adding the Music Library again. When that completed, the vast majority of albums art was blurry. I’m noticing that every new album I add is also blurry now and needs to be manually changed. Any idea what would be causing this?
Thanks
Is it a Premium Music Library?
Are you embedding album art into your files as well?
Are you using or did you use Windows Media Player in the past?
How is the order of agents under
Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - last.fm
and
Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - Plex Premium Music
(which line is at the top of the stack, which lines have a checkmark )?
It’s not a Premium Library. I haven’t even looked at that one yet. Maybe 25% has additional embedded art through MP3Tag. Each time I’d retag an album it said something like “do you want to keep the album art” and in each case I just clicked yes. I do notice in some album folders there are a lot of jpegs with various sizes of album art. I’m assuming this should not be the case? The majority was ripped through Windows Media Player over the years.
Under Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - last.fm I have…
Local Media Assets (albums)
Last.fm
LyricFind
all are checked off except Fanart.tv
Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - Plex Premium Music
Local Media Assets (albums)
Plex Premium Music
LyricFind
They are all checked off.
Thanks for the help!
@PhatJD said:
I do notice in some album folders there are a lot of jpegs with various sizes of album art. I’m assuming this should not be the case? The majority was ripped through Windows Media Player over the years.
Oh yes. Windows Media Player is one of the worst offenders in this regard. It puts several versions of cover art beside the music files, often in very small resolution. And it marks these files then as ‘hidden’ and ‘system’, which makes them harder to find and eradicate.
If you have ‘Local Media Assets’ at the topmost position under
Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - last.fm
then local graphics files take precedence over online supplied cover art (like from last.fm).
If these ‘sidecar’ graphics files (like from Windows Media Player) are present, they take precedence over embedded album art.
So inspect these graphics files carefully and keep only those, which are of a higher resolution/quality than your embedded album art.
If you find a particularly high quality version of a cover, I recommend you to not embed it intop your files, because in the case of a whole album, this would increase the storage footprint of this album immensely. Instead name it cover.jpg and put it into the album folder.
Under Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - last.fm I have…
Local Media Assets (albums)
Last.fm
LyricFind
Fanart.tv
all are checked off except Fanart.tv
Should be OK then.
@OttoKerner said:
If you find a particularly high quality version of a cover, I recommend you to not embed it intop your files, because in the case of a whole album, this would increase the storage footprint of this album immensely. Instead name it cover.jpg and put it into the album folder.
I’ve also found that applications that embed images into files usually scale them down to low-res images anyway, so it kind of defeats the purpose. I use external cover.jpg files for that reason.
Thanks guys. Makes sense and I’ll go check it out.
@beckfield said:
@OttoKerner said:
I’ve also found that applications that embed images into files usually scale them down to low-res images anyway, so it kind of defeats the purpose. I use external cover.jpg files for that reason.
Makes sense, except that if from time to time you want to copy your music files to a portable music player or app that only reads tags, then you won’t have any album art.
As far as the impact on storage capacity, a 500 X 500 thumbnail only adds about 86 KB to the size of the file. Tag editors such as MP3Tag do not scale down the album art when embedding. Rather, they preserve it.
@srewobwj said:
Makes sense, except that if from time to time you want to copy your music files to a portable music player or app that only reads tags, then you won’t have any album art.
You can have the best of both approaches.
Since external cover art is preferred by Plex, you can have lower res embedded covers in each file for portable player use.
Then you have one external cover.jpg in a higher resolution (I am using ~1200px to 1500 px wide) so you see all the details in a fullscreen Plex client like PMP.
If you embed cover this big in quality to each single track in an album, the memory footprint of this album rises significantly.
Good point Otto. I appreciate the insight and feedback.
