Hi I have issue with setting up the correct metadata for music. Mainly, I have a singular artist named Various Artists and a singular album Electronic Vol.1. But when I open the Various Artists artist, there are 40 duplicates of that singular album Electronic Vol.1.
I’ve followed this guide: Adding Music Media From Folders | Plex Support
The only difference that I’ve made is that - I’ve used different album art (the image) for each artist. But the album artist is set to Various Artists and the album name is set to be the same for all the artists.
Is there a limitation - where I have to use the same album art?
Thanks
@OttoKerner
Thank you for the feedback. I guess you are right - it is called album art and not song art
The reason I don’t want to change the album art is, because I have different local music players (AIMP and poweramp for android), which display the unique album art for each song. And I wouldn’t like to add a singular album art for all of these songs.
So a follow up question would be - is there any way I can import an external .m3u/m3u8 in plex, so I can have the same functionality?
Here is the folder structure and the embedded meta:
Not in Plex.
That being said, Plex will simply pick one album art out of all tracks of an album. So you should still be able to use the same files (with different album art embedded) in other players which don’t access your Plex server, but the files directly.
You might want to put a cover.jpg file directly in to the album folder, to define which album art Plex shall use.
I don’t see the “Track No.” tag in your screen shot. You might want to check if it’s there in all tracks and whether it contains resonable values. Because this might be the reason why this album gets fragmented in Plex.
In fact I removed the tracks number on purpose, since this is my own compilation and I didn’t think that that meta was mandatory for plex. I will add it back.
And thank you for the clarification on the album art.
If you make up your own compilation albums, whose tracks were not mastered together, Plex’s loudness analysis will fail.
It then can produce undesirable jumps in loudness when you play these tracks.
You may want to turn to playlists instead to make up your own, well, playlists.
And add the basic tracks in their original “album” or “single” context to Plex.
This approach will also produce more usable metadata in Plex, which in turn enables Plex to generate better automatic playlists/“radios”.
I’m not worried about the wrong loudness levels, since I’ve used foobar2000 to add replaygain (per track), on all the songs in my library. So they have the same loudness.
And the reason I don’t go the route of creating separate folder for each artists, is because I have a lot of artists that have just a single track, so it would be cumbersome to do that. But I agree that this would mess up the generation of automatic radios and playlists.
Plex won’t use this, though. It performs its own analysis which determines a lot more values per song (mainly for overlapping tracks in Sweet Fades).
That is actually not ideal. Isn’t there an option that will allow plex to read replayGain data?
The problem with keeping each artist in separate folder might be automated, but it’s not flexible - since any change made to the compilation, I would have to re-run the script to separate the artists to the appropriate folder.
My suggestion was that you don’t use an album at all. After adding a new artist, you add the new track(s) to the appropriate playlist instead.
Or add the new artist or the new album/single/EP to the appropriate collection.
