Sorry for the dumb question, but I’m in Plex and for my music collection it gives me a choice of some scanners and agents. Can someone please give a definition of a scanner and an agent? I’m trying to get Plex to look only at my music’s embedded metadata, but it insists on partially matching an album’s tracks to an online album, while ignoring a handful of the tracks. This results in the album being split into two albums. Which is dumb because in Apple Music (which is where I manage the music), everything is organized and displays as one album.
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The scanner is the component that will scan the folders assigned to a library and determine what structure / files to consider for Plex.
i.e. the movie scanner will ignore files that are named like tv episodes or folders named Extras.
The agent is the component that will lookup the metadata (titles, descriptions, posters…) of a video. The most common agents will match the files against an online database such as The Movie Database or TheTVDb. To make things a little more complicated… each agent can use a number of sources – so you can e.g. still use local assets such as posters and prioritize them over posters found in the online sources.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/categories/plex-media-server/scanners-agents/
Keep in mind that Apple Music / iTunes aren’t necessarily organizing their files the way Plex likes them to be organized. So if you want this to work, you might need to rely on embedded metadata and make sure that albums are properly tagged in Apple Music. This is critically important if you’re dealing with albums that have different artists (make sure those have the exact same album name and the same album artist across all titles -> this can e.g. be Various Artists).
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Thanks. This is helpful.
The examples I’m talking about are not compilations with different artists, etc. I’m talking about a single album of 4 songs that in Apple Music have absolutely identical titles and album artists (I think I was noticing Plex was treating the song artist as the album artist in some instances. And it may be true that a song may have a different artist/composer than the album artist in these albums. But the album artist field of all these songs are identical.)
I think if Apple Music and Plex have differences, the more major platform takes precedence, and that is undeniably Apple Music. Plex should adopt to Apple Music libraries. Users should not have to perform metadata acrobatics to get Plex to behave.
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