Can I have Album/Artist pictures without the cruft?

[davelartigue]

Okay, things seem to be working now. Here’s everything I did:

1. Reinstalled and restarted Plex to get back the Local Media Assets and put them first
2. Made sure every file had a tag value for Artist, Title, Album, and Album Artist. The first three were all fine but I went ahead and filled in Album Artist for everything. In the case of a compilation, the Album Artist is the name of the compilation, otherwise it’s the same as the Artist
3. redid all track tags as simply ## (01, 02, etc.) instead of “01/12” and so on. I’ve also been removing the disc number unless there are for real multiple discs.
4. redid file structure. Plex used to like it the way I had it but now I am doing
   Music/Subsection/Album Artist/Album/Track - Title
5. also redid the file structure to move all my music subdirectories under a “Music” directory. I only use Plex for music, but I had a Movies directory and some other stuff at the main level, now all music is in one subdirectory.
6. When creating a library, I am using Plex Music, checking Prefer Local Metadata, and unchecking everything else

Three folders have now imported correctly, and I’m working on a fourth. Many, many thanks to everyone who helped me get here. @Ismelda, @beckfield, @BigWheel, thank you for your patience!

[davelartigue]

Updating to add a few more notes:

1. Use MpsTag (and thank you for recommending it!) to remove all extended tag junk. I blow out everything except album, album artist, title, artist, track, disk, and cover. There are some weirdo iTunes tags that can mess things up.

2. I have a lot of tracks that came off of compilations where I don’t care about the compilation. But Plex will match it to a compilation and it can mess it up. Generally any track I have where I don’t care about the album it came from I rename the album to “singles”, which Plex treats just fine. I’m now making sure I do that especially for these orphaned compilation tracks.