I have recently setup a Plex media server (Plex pass customer) on a western digital mycloud device. Took a while to build my libraries of films and music but there now. I have quite a few MP3 tracks missing their TAG information or the tag information is wrong. On some I have changed it within the Plex interface however this doesn’t update the raw file, is there a way to setup Plex to modify the raw file when updating TAG information?
I then tried changing the TAG information using a tag editor however I now cannot get the Plex to update these files within the library, tried rescan’s and forcing metadata updates but its not seeing the new ID information stuck on the old info in the raw files, how can I get round this?
Last question relates to the cover art (or posters as its known in Plex), I have lots of music, I would say 40% of the artists have pictures on them however the remaining are not showing, then albums I would say only 5% tops have artwork displaying. If I click the edit option on the artist or album and go to posters the picture is there so there is no issue with metadata matching or anything it is just not choosing to display the picture, what is the fix for this?
No. Plex made a conscious decision from their beginning that they would never modify your media files.
This is a long-standing issue bug, and one that has caused some controversy and a great deal of frustration (history of this issue). Unfortunately, the only remedy at this time is a workaround called the Plex Dance.
This workaround is far from ideal. It’s inconvenient, and destructive. If you have made custom edits in Plex, or added tracks to Playlists, those changes will be lost, and you’ll have to re-do them manually. I’ve kinda made it my mission to get Plex to fix this.
We did recently discover that at least one thing that causes this is if your tagging program is configured to not change the file’s timestamp when you edit tags. Plex depends on the timestamp to decide whether to re-retrieve the metadata. Plex still needs to deal with this, since most tagging programs have that option, and in some cases it is the default.
I don’t think I’ve experienced this problem, so I can’t offer any help here. All I can say is, I have always found the online sources for metadata (last.FM, Gracenote, etc.) to be very unreliable for correct metadata, so I’ve put in the work to have the metadata defined locally, either embedded in my media files (tags), or as “sidecar” files (images). My Plex server is configured to prefer local media over the online sources.
If you choose to download album art and source it locally, this message shows what Plex needs in order to find it automatically.
