Doing the Plex "two step" dance

hey @ukbo0

Music is a funny one, well not funny but not exactly what you might expect, plex uses different fields to what you might be editing. Be sure to check that!

Of particular note are the fields Album Artist and Artist which are both present inside plex but not in your tag editor.

These are important for compilations, so you would have “Various Artists” as Album Artist and the Artist of the track itself in “Artist” - once you figure this one out plex music organisation can be pretty simple.

Also I personally do not use any embedded tags (causes more headaches than it’s worth) on music rather I dump the music into

X:\music\artist\album and add the top music dir to the library.

add a single album you might find to be problematic into plex and inspect it, now editing music inside plex is really quite powerful, you have artist level, album level and track level.

If you want to see this clean just for your own curiosity create a new library for testing and throw a bit of music in and play around - create one that ignores local metadata. Look for all the edit pencils there are a couple and editing music while it is similar to video, it’s not the same.

If you have questions throw them up here as there are multiple ways to bulk edit albums inside plex and once you discover them I think you will be pleasantly surprised. I found it worked much, much better than I expected when I figured out how it was all actually working and I worked with it not against it!

Hi Power

Thanks for your reply, I am somewhat surprised (no, gobsmacked) that Plex actually messes around with album data as well.

As for your suggestion, I thank you for that, I am too long in the tooth to start experimenting with Plex now and like an old dog you can’t teach new tricks to (being 70+) I’m hoping for a simple solution.

To that end, I am going to re-copy those four albums over again to my RN102, but via my PC first rather than directly. I will re-examine those four albums, while their on my PC, just to see if there is something that may have caused Plex to change “Jay” to Jim and Joe.

Right now, I have three problems with Plex:-

  1. The Plex 2-Step dance on some of my TV seasons.
  2. The Plex 2-Step dance on my digital albums.
  3. One of my Plex databases (on one of my three RNDuoV2s) will no longer open when I click it’s icon, this started to happen after a Windows 11 update.

More problems than I care to deal with.

Anyway, cheers.

UK Bob

trust me on music, once you get your head around it it’s pretty simple and absolutely fantastic, like properly good.