Server Version#: Whatever the latest version is
Player Version#: 3.77.2
I’ve just gone through a lot of hassle to ensure all my metadata tags are accurate and have high quality album art embedded into the files. I’m not big on having a bunch of extra album art files in every folder.
I did the Plex dance to the best of my knowledge, as well as setting the local files to primary source in the agents, but reloading the music library still has all the album art as blurry, low res, thumbnail messes. Does Plex not read from the metadata? If not that basically invalidates a weeks worth of work. I don’t have any other loose .jpg images or any other photo format in my music files. All artwork is embedded.
I had this same issue until I discovered that I had some album art I wasn’t aware of. Displaying hidden files in Windows wasn’t enough to see them. I had to display system files as well as hidden files. Once I got rid of the system image files everything worked as it should.
One caveat though, album art stored in dsf files isn’t displayed even if you get rid of system image files. As far as I and others can determine, Plex doesn’t support metadata stored in dsf files.
Just to see if this is your issue, you can open a command prompt (open the start menu and type cmd), then type these commands in the window that pops up:
cd c:\users\dmel\music (change path to wherever your music files are stored) dir /s /as *.jpg
If anything shows up, that’s your problem. If not, there’s something else going on.
So it did show at least some stuff in the Beatles, which seems odd considering I did the metadata with Picard and then manually transferred the “clean” files to a new folder, where it doesn’t show any “loose” .jpg and I didn’t transfer any over.
Is there a possibility it’s reading the album art embedded?
When you added the album art using Picard, did you happen to notice how much the size of the music files changed? I ask because some metadata apps will automatically downsize images when they embed into the files to prevent creating huge files. If you embed a 2MB image file in a music track, the size of the music file should increase by 2MB. If it doesn’t, the app is probably reducing the image it embeds.
Like you, I used to prefer embedded art. But when I discovered what I just described, I decided it was better to have a single high-quality image in the folder than to embed huge copies of the same image in each music file. That eats up disk space in a hurry.
(I’ve been having issues with Plex not picking up my discrete images, so there’s a possibility that, if you change over to discrete images, you may still have a problem until that’s fixed.)
I haven’t paid attention to the file size, but most of the album art is coming from Fanart.tv, which is all 1000x1000. It displays properly in Musicbee and VLC player, and I can extract the album art in Musicbee and Mp3tag.
The 1000x1000 is under 1mb, so I’m not too concerned about the size. I’d also prefer it to be embedded since apparently everything except for Plex reads embedded album art.
…And now having looked at I link I thought you seemed familiar. I already did those steps and the Plex dance
Well now it seems that some of them are using higher res album art, but War for example is reported in MP3tag as having 1000x1000 but in Plex it looks like 50x50.
I’d check your album art in mp3tag or similar on Mac and make sure it’s not got some weird album art. But Plex should also scan the library and download new stuff anyways, so I’m not sure.
