During the scan Plex attributed over 200 items to George Gershwin that should have been Various Artists. I manually cleaned that up. It took a long while! Even with the ‘Local files only’ switched for album art, somewhere in the ballpark of 5-10% of albums get added without the cover sitting in the same path as the music files, or with the wrong image being displayed. In a large library that means 100s of albums. I am going to be at this for many days, doing 1 or 2 alphabets at a time, going down the list. I’ll backup the db when it is done
It has also created 5 albums attributed to George Gershwin called ‘La Bamba (7 inch)’ with miscellaneous content from multiple albums and multiple genres. It has appended a Poster to all 5 that is a Mozart album cover. It has created a 6th album attributed to George Gershwin called ‘[Unknown Album]’ that also has miscellaneous contents from multiple locations.
I have file deletion enabled, but the attempt to delete the albums returns an error, like ‘There was a problem deleting this…’ — no further details. Files have not been deleted from the drive, and album has not been deleted from Plex.
What is the great technical difficulty in deleting database entries? I tried it with file deletion turned off, and it demanded to have file deletion permission. Why? This is a serious problem. Forcing me to move data to a separate location, to empty the Trash in Plex, and then move data back into place ---- how does one arrive at the decision that it is proper for a software app to demand this of the user? Did it occur to anyone that perhaps the data is also being used by other apps? Is Plex working for me, or am I working for Plex?
PS - This issue has been brought up before, many times for many years—the topics are closed. I suppose the developer focus is on 3rd party content providers now, not the user experience. The user is the product. I have begun researching open source alternatives.
The newly installed Windows version intended to be a backup streamer is struggling mightily to finish the initial scan. It is stuck at 2421 albums for a long while now, out of a total 6978. The scan has been running for several days. It also hung Windows up twice, forcing a hard reboot. Who knows, maybe the db is corrupted.
I cleaned up the badly jumbled albums, over 2+ hours of PITA work. Now it has a new kink. It will not take manual edits to artist names. Sometimes it gives a drop down prompt from a name in the db, and sometimes not. But in both cases it reverts to a name of its own choosing—the wrong one!
Plex does not look at the file name itself for clues? It will miss ‘Stevie Wonder’ in the file name?
If I understand correctly, you are running into an issue that the folder organization standards warns about, when folders/metadata tags are not properly sorted for various artists. Here is what I think you are hitting:
Warning : If you have embedded metadata and particularly if you enable the Prefer local metadata setting for the music library, you need to make sure that the embedded metadata follows this information. Failure to do so can cause all the Various Artist content to be mis-categorized under a different artist.
Thanks for the reply, Dyno. My music is 98% well tagged. (The other 2% is junk I don’t care about.) It is a tidy library, and yes, it has Various Artists and VA tags for albums. The Artist for tracks is not picked up by Plex. So, it will show Leonard Bernstein, NY Philharmonic as the album artist, and the album might be Symphony No. 3 & 4 — it does not tell me whose symphonies they are. I can usually tell from the album cover, but the artist tag does not get picked up at all. It should be.
I never listen to music on Plex, but my ex wife wants to play things for our grand daughter. That’s why I am fussing with it to make it easy for her to find the stuff she remembers.
The half dozen jumbled albums got jumbled by some bug. Properly tagged things got jumbled in with various artist and unknown artist files. And, they all got attributed to George Gershwin!
Movies and TV shows are a smooth experience mostly, but my library is small anyway. I added some children’s animated Shakespeare videos, and Plex made a complete mess! It promptly downloaded all sorts of wrong posters and information for them. It also wrongly identified The Tempest with Christopher Plummer as the one with Helen Mirren. I fixed them all manually. Now I have to fix them again on the backup server, because they can’t read from each other apparently.
All these wrong posters are sitting in my drive----the drive usage keeps blowing up. Is it so hard to have a delete option for tagged images? I don’t get it.
It would be nice if album covers could be batched. I had to attach the same image to 33 albums of the complete Haydn symphonies. The art is embedded in the file, but that is not supported.
Put the cover as a file, named cover.jpg or folder.jpg into the folder of the album.
If you use subfolders for each disc of a multi-disc album, put it into the subfolder for disc 1.
btw. this allows you to use larger files, with higher quality than what you would reasonably embed.
Almost every folder already has image files. Almost all the MP3s have embedded files. They are often named cover or folder, but most often they are named front. This may be what it is, Plex does not recognize ‘front’ file name. But sometimes it does load up all the available images. Sometimes none at all. It is not consistent, or I have not discovered what the consistent pattern is. While scanning the library it scans the sub folders with images, according to activity monitor.
90+% of the time, it does the job. But -10% of a large library means 100s of albums have to be fixed manually. If the file name ‘front’ is not recognized as one of the defaults, perhaps it should be, along with cover and folder.
The Windows server appears to have completed the scan, and gives an album total of 6492. The old Linux server shows an album count of 7029. The directory is the same.
I just discovered there are dozens of albums under ‘[Unknown Artist]’ which will have to be deleted and re-read. They are wrongly bundled albums from properly tagged files. Yet, I will have to move the files, empty the trash, and move the files back in----dozens of times.
They are indeed all also ‘[Unknown Album]’ under ‘[Unknown Artist]’ ---- but the problem is that miscellaneous files are jumbled together from different directories. Each bundle has files from multiple locations, by multiple artists. It is not a matter simply of re-writing the tags. The whole bundle has to be deleted, and all the files read again.
You have to understand, users don’t want to be told by software what we “must” do with our data for the convenience of an application. We expect the application to be smart enough to read the data, and work it out. Perhaps I should try to change the scanner and agent back to the older versions, like the other user.
I used the Masstagger plugin for Foobar 2000 to overhaul the meta tags across the whole library. Now there is nothing without an Album Artist, and nothing without an Album name designated. I made dummy album names like (Compilation), (Album), (Miscellany) and such like to bundle old single MP3 files laying around. Today I did a library wide ‘Refresh All Metadata’. It correctly refreshed some albums that I noticed.
It also did what the following screenshots show. I only took a cursory look. I don’t know how many albums have been assigned to Mozart. It looks like the whole 100 albums of the Franklin Mint Collection has been given to Mozart. And, look at the photo it has brought from the cloud for Mozart. None of these are Unknown or Various Artists. They are all properly tagged albums sitting in dedicated directories, with the artist and album in the directory path.
Of course, I have included the second row to show how it works when it works properly. I shared the screenshots because I did not want anyone to think I’m exaggerating or trolling. Plex Music is alpha software at best. Movies and TV shows work fine for me. It did not recognize some Shakespeare videos, but that’s okay.
My suggestion: when in doubt, ask user for confirmation — something like, “The following changes will be made to your library items, please check / uncheck the boxes to confirm.”
