I wanted to get feedback from moderators and/or creators from Plex on why did the company decide to stop using Gracenote as a music source that helped build Plex’s Premium Music and replace it with MusicBrainz?
The music service now on Plex is lacking discovery unless you have Tidal with Plex and that’s not what the Plex Premium used to be.
Plex Mix was a great option to start a playlist based on a specific song and at times really good because it came from Gracenote which works with nearly every music publisher and label to gather music data. Musicbrainz is community based, but without the outreach, you cannot match the support to have something like Plex Mix.
You have Artist Radios and Genre Radios in PlexAmp, but it just isn’t the same.
Feedback on why Gracenote was discontinued and MusicBrainz replaced it would be great!
Thank you for sharing the blog post. There is no “irritating, over-the-top hype” here. MusicBrainz supply cannot do the stuff that Gracenote used to do.
Check out the following stated in the article about MusicBrainz and what it does for Plex Music now:
Possibly the most important source in the music mix is Musicbrainz. It’s a vast wealth of music knowledge curated by a loving community who really care about the little things. We think it’s a perfect fit for our community, who also care about the little things, and we’re thrilled to have them as a key partner in serving up the very best metadata. In the event that you find something missing or, heaven forbid, outright wrong, you can now head over to Musicbrainz and fix it. As they say, a rising tide lifts all boats — you’ll be doing a good turn for your own library, helping the Musicbrainz community, and helping everyone else who places a value on pristine music metadata around the planet. It’s basically one step shy of some Ghandi level.
You need reliable sources that are constantly on top of music and work with the labels to improve how we recognize music. I admire the music community for contributing, but it lacks what you can gather in terms of pure music data and what you can do to help make you understand the music you have.
My experience has been quite different. The amount of inaccurate information that Plex gathered for my libraries decreased significantly when they moved to Musicbrainz. It still wasn’t great, but it was a noticeable improvement. Add to that the fact that I can go into Musicbrainz and correct the bad information for the albums I have (a capability that Gracenote actually removed when they commercialized their database), and my confidence is far higher in Musicbrainz than in Gracenote.
Thank you for your feedback. Can you provide steps on how to do this on MusicBrainz. I have an account but I have no idea how I can go into MusicBrainz to correct the bad information about albums.
Is there a way for Plex to incorporate more MusicBrainz data it already has into Plex? I use the Last.FM.ng plug-in with MusicBrainz and the worth of information that it gives back is awesome but I can only seem to get basic genre information to appear on Plex for it, nothing else.
Plex only supports a small set of the many tags that are available. There are feature requests to expand that, but until they make those changes, we’re stuck.
