I have several albums from artist Bonnie Prince Billy, all properly named and tagged. This artist is listed on last.fm as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy with image, album list, biography, etc. There are two additional entries on last.fm that are related to him but do not contain any data. The first one is Bonnie “Prince” Billy and seems to automatically redirect to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (at least that is what happens on the last.fm website). The second one is Bonnie “Prince” Billy and only contains the following test as biography:
This is an incorrect tag for Bonnie “Prince” Billy. If this non-artist appears in your charts, do last.fm and yourself a favor. Fix your artist tags.
The problem is that the Plex last.fm agent systematically matches my albums with the Bonnie “Prince” Billy entry, hence I get the text above as bio, no image, popular tracks, etc. Even if I go to Fix Match and then Search options, only the Bonnie “Prince” Billy entry is proposed, not Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy nor Bonnie “Prince” Billy, no matter what I enter as search string or how I name or tag the files.
How could I point Plex to the correct entry? Is there a specific issue with quotes or aportrophes that need to be escaped in some way?
I guess you would just not worry about last.fm and set the tags correctly with MP3Tag - like I do.
I use Last.fm to get artwork I can’t find through google or something.
I use the Plex naming guidelines so there are no invisible items.
I embed the artwork in with the item with MP3Tag and tag it correctly so it shows up how I want it.
For instance, here’s Rachel D’Arcy. Saw her singing one of her two songs in an Endeavour Episode and bought the single at Amazon for $1.20 or something. At the time she had no listing at last.fm (BTW the beosch squandered that moola never making another song - guess she rounded out her fortune with $1.20 and took off for Tahiti):
And as you can see I did get that Single Sleeve at Amazon with my hard earned $1.20, placed it in with the files and dragged it onto MP3Tag dropping it in the box provided making sure all the other important bits of info were how they need to be - the ‘Important bits’ are Album, Artist and Album Artist maybe. If you have Artist right I guess you don’t need Album Artist - year is nice too:
My Music Library was a bomb crater - nothing worked. I had 12 thousand Various Artists.
One day I set to work, found MP3Tag, starting naming stuff according to the guidelines, fixing tags and it changed my life, Man.
Now I look forward to adding a new music item - or humiliating Bieber and his delusional fans. LOL
Sure, my files are tagged with Musicbrainz Picard, so I could easily grab cover art and save it in the tags and / or album folders, and Plex would pick that up rather than looking on last.fm.
That would work for album data, but not for artist data though. In your Rachel D’Arcy screenshot, aren’t her picture and short bio (Female singer songwriter…) pulled from last.fm? I see from the first post you link to that I could add the picture manually by saving it in the artist folder, but not sure how to deal with the bio (although I can of course live without it). Also having a last.fm match would save me some work. Finally I wonder why, when I manually search for a match and there is an exact match for my search string, it is not proposed in the search results.
I googled her and clicked on the images link - there were a few from the show, but I liked the Beret and the Uke so dragged that one in the edit window (under the pencil thingy on her artist page) where it says ‘Drag and Drop’ after clicking ‘Poster’. Easy.
This link will explain how to name and place artwork that should load automatically - if you’re so inclined:
That’s from ‘Otto The Wizard of Plex’ - so even though I haven’t tried it I’d treat it as the gospel.
Last.fm - is our ‘non-plex pass’ option and does leave something to be desired, but after a few turns with MP3Tag it’s almost easier to set the metadata and name/structure than it is to fiddle around with last.fm… in fact I’m sure it is. I ran 6 in by Nina Simone and 2 in by Ry Cooder in under 8 minutes a while ago (including running all through MP3Gain) and I might have spent a half hour or more futzing with last.fm to do the same thing and still may have had to back up and punt when that turned out badly.
