I have different versions of some albums. They are different mixes, masters and bit rates. For example, I have Sgt. Pepper in mono and stereo, in 24-96 and 32-192, from vinyl and reel tape, in MFSL master and the Giles Martin master, and so on. This is the case for quite a few albums. I don’t want them bundled together.
Related to this, when I am filling out the meta tags, I don’t want existing album names to auto select unless I click on them actively. I chose a different name and clicked on ‘Save Changes’ but because the drop down list of existing names was open it defaulted to the top one. Now, both versions are bundled together. How do I un-bundle them? How do I un-bundle all such bundles in the library?
The library management for music is not working for me at all. Movies and videos are fine, but not music. The search engine is also useless — it came up with “No results found” for example!
As a serious music collector, you cannot rely on automatic matches at all, I’ve learned.
Both last.fm and Gracenote have too few versions of an album listed and too many errors.
I assume you have already tagged your files with great care.
The trick is to tell Plex to give your embedded meta tags top priority.
Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - Premium Music
if it isn’t already, drag the line ‘Local Media Assets’ into the topmost position
repeat the same under
Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - last.fm
Then edit your music library,
go to the ‘Advanced’ tab
put a check mark into ‘Use embedded meta tags’
Now, you need to check the folder structure of your albums
and their embedded meta tags.
TL;DR:
Put the ‘edition information’ of an album into the ‘Album Title’ meta tag. (e.g. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (RM 2009) [96/24])
Put each edition of an album into an own folder, so the different editions sit beside each other. Don’t create ‘superfolders’, which collect each of the different editions of a particular album.
Once you’ve done all this, you’ll have to convince Plex to let go of its mismatched data about your files by performing the Plex Dance.
(with music, step 4 can be omitted)
Thanks for the reply, Otto! I already have ‘Local media assets’ on top. The versions all have different album tags, with very few possible exceptions—like (Parlophone Mono), (Apple serial#) (Japan Reissue), (2016 Remaster), etc.
I did not however see in Settings - Library - Advanced the box ‘Use embedded meta tags’. There is a Plex update available, so I will install it and see if it shows up.
The 'Dance" is a last resort I want to avoid. It takes many hours to scan my whole library.
I’m afraid the Dance cannot be avoided in cases like this
.
You don’t have to Plex Dance your whole library. Test it out first with a few albums.
Then you can decide on the appropriate strategy for going forward.
As Plex is not my default music player I’m not going to go for the big dance. I keep the library tidy for those rare occasions when I may want to play something from outside the house.
I hope the developers will take note of the issues for upcoming releases. Thanks for your attention, Otto!
