I know that it’s supposed to but it just does not. I spend more time curating my library than actually listening to it so it’s very frustrating for me. I love so much about Plex - in fact pretty much everything else - but the fact that it will ignore/override my tags (that I spent days and days (ok weeks) doing for some 500k tracks) drive me up the wall.
now here is my tagscanner shot - note the year on the album (this is also included in the title because this artist had trouble naming his releases so there are several self titled albums)
And here - Plex has decided (via Gracenote I am assuming) to override my year - my copy is a vinyl rip - it is not ripped from the CD release decades later - and truthfully I don’t care when the CD was released, - I want to use the “decades” search sorting so I am more concerned about when the original music was released than I am a particular copy.
Sometimes it even over-rides album art, sometimes it over-rides album title and matches an album to something it’s not.
I work very hard to make sure my tags are perfect - I’d be super happy if Plex would read them and only pull information from other sources if it is missing from the tag (it’s not)
I think if Plex could fix this issue on the music side, then it would be practically perfect in every way.
[Side note - this could possibly be, in this instance, because the album release date is just Year format in my tag, but truthfully, unlike movies, the full release date string of Year-Month-Day is unnecessary for music and is frequently something that is not known except for new releases]
@beckfield 's guide above contains another setting to make, which is crucial:
Change the order of the metadata agents, and place the ‘Local Media Assets’ agent at the top.
Yep - already done that. (This is not my first go around with this topic)
Here’s the other thing I’ve noticed. Even though I have all of this set and all of the information is in my tags, if gracenote does not recognize the album, you get nothing - no genre, no date, and usually (but not always) no cover art.
I cannot confirm that.
Another thing: if you added the album first into Plex and only afterwards changed the agent order and the preference in the library, you must Plex Dance the Album.
(with music, you can omit step 4 of the Dance)
Give it plenty of time after re-addidng the album.
And don’t try updating more than one Plex-library at once.
There is currently another issue on Linux-based platforms: if your folder or file names contain non-ascii characters, the LMA agent ceases to work. (LMA is responsible for everything on disk locally, so embedded tags too).
If your server runs not on Windows (or your media are stored on a Linux-based NAS) you might be affected by this.
What’s funny is, I got a new drive and I moved this entire library - so kinda already done that.
And I am Windows based.
My big issue that I don’t understand is why it just can’t read my tags? - seems pretty simple to me…seems like it would be easier that making all this code to have Gracenote mangle my library. (Gracenote STILL doesn’t know who the country singer Norma Jean is…) I love all of the other functionality of Plex and if they could just fix this one thing . . . It would be heaven.
@jackgardner73 said:
What’s funny is, I got a new drive and I moved this entire library - so kinda already done that.
Depending on how you did this, it doesn’t necessarily amount to the same thing.
My big issue that I don’t understand is why it just can’t read my tags?
Plex reads my tags. I am using a Premium Music library and yet nothing from Gracenote overrides my embedded tags. (As it should, since Gracenote still has stuff in their database which is annoyingly wrong.)
I see in your above screenshot that your embeded tags are encoded in UTF-16. I am not sure if this is part of the issue. Could you provide me with some sample files, tagged like you are wont to do, so I can recreate your issue here?
(just zip and upload somewhere like Google Drive or similar and PM me the download link)
I discovered earlier in another thread that for “use embedded metadata” to work, you can not simply switch the setting. And it even does not help to Plex dance the problematic albums.
Instead, it was found out that this setting needed to be turned on as the library is created. Otherwise it would not work. It was some time ago so maybe things are different now, but considering the problems you are facing, perhaps it’s worth a shot?
I guess you could just create a new library quickly and, just for test, drop in some problematic albums. Just a few. If it works, then you know what you gotta do.
@jackgardner73 said:
And my tags are UTF-16 because i have tags in Cyrillic as well as Latin text.
I was mistaken about the UTF-16 thing. Apparently it is no problem, as I have several albums in my test library which have tags in UTF-16. Among them one with mixed japanese and latin characters.
And it works.
I tested the software you are using in that screenshot. It is pretty slick!
This IS a new library
So I guess it is log files time. Please don’t do anything else with your Plex system during this procedure:
I will do that this evening. . . . has anyone noticed since the last update that you can’t edit music genre tags in Plex? I haven’t tried editing anything else - I just noticed that problem this morning.
We’ve kind of given up on expecting these problems to be fixed. It seems that no one on the Dev team believes us that it’s broken. I don’t know if they only test with popular (i.e. Gracenote friendly) music or what, but everyone in Plex world seems to think it works great. We’ve even sent example files for them to test…nothing. I resorted to renaming the files with excessively long names to prevent Gracenote from incorrectly matching artists and albums. Our tags are correct, painstakingly correct…
Recommendation for finely tuned/curated music libraries: Setup your library as a “Basic” music library. Do not create a “Premium” library. In my experience, it only causes problems.
