interesting. the utility i see on the right click may not be part of windows but rather shipped with dbpoweramp, which I use to rip cds. I’ve used it so long I forgot it wasn’t standard.
Very good! Could you make a screenshot of the issue? I have some trouble imagining it.
Another tool to edit metatags across different file formats is mp3tag.
I am not sure how to screen shot a thing that happened to my whole library. You can see from the first and last xml i sent on the sample file that the first one has a different (abridged) title, I presume from musicbrainz, while when I create a new library, it correctly reads the local metadata. both the old and the new test library are set up, and always have been, to prefer local metadata. So the issue is 1) what possessed Plex to overwrite all my metadata with inferior crud, and 2) How do I get my good metadata back? Asking Plex to refresh doesn’t seem to do anything, and 3) How can I make sure Plex doesn’t do this again?
Does the same happen if you Refresh Metadata on the whole Album Artist in Plex?
(Wait several minutes afterwards, to make sure it is really finished with all albums)
Can you remember when you added the last album to that particular artist?
Because it can happen that the metadata of all albums of a particular artist are not updated to the new musicbrainz code until either a new album is added to that artist or until ‘Refresh Metadata’ is triggered on the whole artist.
So the first several times I tried refresh metadata, it did nothing to the albums I was manually checking. This time it fixed some of the albums for this artist but not others.
This is a band I just added an album for this week. But Plex went nuts on my whole library… It was doing some sort of update for about 8 hours before I stopped it, and I could see from the dashboard that it was marching through artists that had not had any new albums. So I don’t know the extent of what it was doing.
You stopped the library update? It might be possible that this might have left some artists and albums in an undefined state.
Whenever something weird happens now, try first to refresh the artist.
If that doesn’t change anything, perform the Plex Dance “light” (i.e. without step 4) with all albums of the artist.
(Unless you have a lot of manually created playlists, which will lose all tracks from the “danced” albums.)
I haven’t done a lot with playlists but I suspect I would lose all my custom genre tags doing that dance…
I stopped whatever plex was doing when I started seeing it overwriting my metadata. All I wanted was for it to find the CDs I had ripped and Plex went off for hours cranking away on my library, giving very few updates on the dashboard but at one point many many hours in, the dashboard suddenly flashed some messages about retrieving metadata from the internet, and I checked and lo and behold my local metadata was being overwritten. Stopping this runaway process seemed like the right move.
I get that at this point I probably have to delete my whole library and try to restore from a backup and try discovering the new albums again. If I don’t want to lose the hours and hours of work I put into my genre tags. What I don’t know is how to do something that should be easy: scan for new content, without breaking my library again.
Hi, Otto.
So I tried to restore from a backup but the same problem is happening. I can, however, describe the behavior in greater detail this time around.
I restored from my backup from before I added the latest CDs. All my metadata looked good.
Then I executed the command to scan the library, in order to find new files.
I watched as the dashboard flew fairly quickly through my main music folder, loading all the new disks, with incorrect metadata from, I presume, musicbrainz, and overwriting existing metadata on some albums that were previously good. The dashboard flashed by scanning messages for every folder, not just the new ones.
Then Plex moved on to scanning my folder of classical music. Here it seems to have a huge problem with the fact that I have used composer names as album artists where it made sense for me to do so. (I don’t see how it is useful to list 400 CDs of JS Bach music under Various Artists, making it really hard to just cueue up a bunch of Bach or find my disks, even if technically there are several artists on the CD.)
At this point, the scanning process has slowed to a crawl. It is taking ten minutes to think about every album (judging from the match log files and how rarely the dashboard changes its message). At this rate, it will take 66 hours just to get through my Bach folder and several weeks to get through the rest of my classical music.
I had let that process run for about 8 hours last time before stopping it (it was still, after 8 hours, stuck on Bach) I have no idea if the now broken metadata would correct itself if I had let the process finish. I don’t know why, given my settings, Plex is working so hard to break my metadata to begin with.
But I can’t really see myself letting plex crank away for several weeks without being able to reboot my computer just in order to bollocks up my data.
Any suggestions? Is this just a ‘broken by design’ issue and it’s tough cookie for me?
As long as you have stored these genre tags into the files themselves and not just edited them within Plex, they are safe.
Did you find the drop-down selector in the properties of the library? You can use it to give these embedded genres priority over those from online data sources.
Please try the dance on one artist (preferably one with only a few albums).
The weirdness with classical albums is a well known bug.
No, sadly all my genre tags were in plex because I was never sure how other players I have to use would handle multiple genre tags per album (or track). I suppose I should test that with windows media player and dbpoweramp, and if they both support it, go ahead and redo all my genre tags in the files. Or switch to making less use of genre tags and more use of playlists. But playlists don’t travel as easily between apps as genre tags might. And I still have to experiment with multiple apps because of all the long standing ‘well known’ Plex bugs.
I’ll stop the scan started yesterday (still stuck on Bach) and try to plex dance an artist folder. But it seems like if classical music is just broken, and it is ‘well known’ that this is broken… It seems like this is never going to behave properly. I appreciate knowing that Plex knows this is a problem, but hearing it called ‘well known’ gives a vibe of ‘this is not a priority, don’t hold your breath’.
Do you see any downside to trying out the older deprecated agent (plex music vs plex music scanner) by restoring my backup again and see if that will just discover my music without wrecking my metadata? I suppose at that point I’ve just consigned myself to only add albums as long as the deprecated agent is available.
I dunno. I really want Plex to work - I love the idea and even some of the design, but I don’t have much faith that Plex cares about fixing their ‘well known’ bugs. WMA playback has been wonky for years (maybe always), introducing clearly audible skips and jumps in tempo in pristine files and every topic I see this mentioned in gets icy silence from everyone at Plex.
All I want Plex to do is let me navigate to and play my music on the supported devices. Occasionally I would like to add some albums without wrecking all my work on providing great metadata. These seem like a pretty basic asks for a media server, but apparently I am asking for the world. I don’t mean to take this off topic, I just have that sinking feeling of ‘why am I trouble shooting ‘well known’ problems on software where it seems like the developers don’t give a ■■■■.’
The last time I was pulling my hair out at Plex, I tried Emby out… They did a great job of streaming error free lossless WMA to my phone, let me navigate my whole library on my phone… Seemed like a good fit. So I paid for their service and it turns out their paid apps for offline syncing and for playing on smart tvs and so on have absolute rubbish navigation to the point of being unusable. Sad, really, that the free bits could work so much better than Plex, but the paid bits be such garbage.
Sorry. Didn’t mean to turn this into a therapy session for my PTSD over crappy software.
My scan stopped, so i’ll go do a plex dance and see what happens.
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Yes, multi-disc albums don’t work with it.
And embedded album art.
Plex for music is really frustrating, since they have all the ingredients to make things work, performance is good, network code is pretty great too, clients are quite good - but because of ill-thought-out design choices at various points in the development (like making genre and year album-level fields instead of track-level, not using a dedicated composer field, insisting on replacing embedded metadata with ‘matched’ Musicbrainz metadata, folder/filename overriding embedded tags, and so on) it never gets where it could be, and the forums stay filled with an ever repeating cycle of the same bug reports.
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Otto, I looked at your instructions for the Plex dance, but I’m not sure how I can test the plex dance since I can’t get a scan to finish due to the known issues with classical music. Thoughts?
I have no satisfying answer for you. Except that you could maybe try with a subset of your library. If possible, remove all those problematic classical album for now.
What does ‘multidisk albums don’t work’ mean? Since I just want it to read my local metadata, I don’t care about how someone like musicbrainz treats multidisk albums. In my metadata, they are all treated as single disks with contiguous track numbers. I see no reason to be a slave to the historical accident of what the track numbers were in 1996 or whatever based on how much a CD could hold. So that might not be relevant to me.
If that is the case, then you won’t be affected by this. The bug strikes if the track numbers start with 1 on every disc.
Well, I tried the old agent and not only did zero pieces of embedded album art load, but also not a single embedded genre tag was extracted from my wma files.
the track titles that the new agent wrecks, btw, were perfect. but without genre tags or cover art, it is pretty lame.
so the situation as it stands is that I can either use the old agent and forgo genre tags and album art, or never add any music to my library ever again, since the new agent can’t get through a scan of my library and breaks my metadata no matter what settings we try.
I think you’d agree where we are at at this point, right, Otto? I have no idea what your relationship with the company is, but at what point is an actual support ticket to fix these bugs (or broken by design ‘features’) opened. What’s the followup from Plex? I think I know the answer: Plex doesn’t give a darn and it will be a cold day in Hades when Plex ever fixes a music related bug that doesn’t help them sell a subscription to someone. I feel like I’ve given Plex a lot of opportunities to change my perspective of them. Ha, I am writing as if my bad opinion of them could possibly matter to them when it is crystal clear from their behavior that they could not possibly care less.
I hope some lawyers get a hold of how much contempt Plex has for their customers or just their disinterest in making software that does what they say they can do and get a class action lawsuit going. I am so sick of this contempt based software model.
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