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Music library in a separate folder – 3900 tracks approximately.
Using MP3TAG I can see approximately 300 tracks that have the genre “Christmas”
PLEX when selecting genre as “Christmas” finds only one album.
There must be something that I do not understand here.
Any help understanding this apparent discrepancy would be appreciated.
Thank in advance
If this is about embedded metadata… are all those files using the same separators?
Do you get to see all approx. 300 tracks if you filter them using an advanced filter w/ Genre – contains – Christmas?
Plex only stores Genres per album, not per track.
In answer to tom80H I do not know about files and separators. Each track is a separate file and has the genre of “Christmas”. I can see all of that metadata using MP3TAG.
Using the Advanced function, there is no operator “contains” only “is” or “is not”.
OttoKerner’s response seemed to indicate that PLEX does not honor the .mp3 file genre and only has data if the tracks(files) are part of an album. That is not the case with most of these files.
As an example I have an album entitled “A Christmas Album” (Barbra Streisand). The entire album is Christmas stuff. MP3TAG shows the genre as “Christmas” . Reviewing my files I have many albums, like that – all Christmas stuff.
Nowhere can I find a metadata tag associated with an album – only files.
Am I to conclude that PLEX ignores the track/file tags in favor of some other values that it has?
As a continuation of my question, I examined the PLEX music library and saw many tracks associated with the 5th Dimension. They are real albums generally recognized, yet PLEX characterizes them as [Unknown Album].
Again there must be something I am doing incorrectly but cannot determine what it is.
Throwing 3900 files in a single folder is certainly not Plex’ favorite use case.
Even if those files are perfectly tagged (album, album artists, artist…), Plex will perform significantly better if you follow a basic organization.
The more I examine it is obvious something is wrong.
When sorted Albums by Title PLEX shows 34 albums with Dolly Paton in the Library. All have the ‘wrong’ picture.
In fact there are only two albums from that artist.
Is the database corrupted or ??
I apologize if I mislead anyone – there are not 3900 files in a single folder.
Instead the Music directory has 202 sub-directories each dedicated to a particular artist.
Each artist sub-directory has another sub-directory per album or in isolated cases a sub-directory called “various” and the individual tracks are stored there.
You’re exactly right. As far as I know, there is no tag editing software that applies a genre to an album, the genre is applied to the individual tracks. It’s a big shortcoming when using Plex for music. Here’s one of several posts/requests to fix the problem. (Music tracks need genre)
Plex will apply the genres from the individual tracks to the album, but it requires you have the library configured to use “Prefer Local Metadata” in the advanced settings of the library. If there’s only one track in the album that has “Christmas” as a genre, the whole album will have Christmas as a genre. And that means you may get a bunch of “un-Christmas” tracks included in your playlist.
If you enable that setting, be careful, ALL of your tags need to be perfect, or you may end up with a completely broken library.
If you’re library is using genres supplied by Plex, try searching for “Holiday” as a genre…
Well, this exchange has turned in a different direction than I would have thought.
leelynds has explained that PLEX apparently applies the genre of a particular track to an entire album. His pointer to other discussions on this topic verifies this design/implementation anomaly.
If someone could point me to the “Prefer Local Metadata” in the advanced settings of the library it would be appreciated.
The PLEX approach seems inconsistent to say the least. Others have stronger views.
Apparently my PLEX library is ‘dumb’ relative to information available that could be used. Making Playlists is almost impossible, selecting stuff is also awkward at best. It explains why the PLEX information I am seeing that is inconsistent with the actual underlying data.
The only reasonably accurate view of what is actually in the library is the All>>Tracks view.
What I have done is used Windows Media Player (WMP) and pointed it to the PLEX music library. Since the PLEX library is organized by Artist>>Album WMP grinds through the indexing and cataloging process and comes up with its own database that is surprisingly accurate with a reasonable GUI.
The next step will be to make playlists in WMP and then import them into PLEX.
I want to thank leelynds and his pointers to other discussions to provide accurate answers to lingering questions.
If I have difficulty, I will start a new thread.
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