Having trouble getting Plex to show album cover art

General Discussions
1

I have some albums which are from obscure Bandcamp artists, so the metadata is not something the Plex Music scanner can look up.

The files are well tagged and include cover art. The folders also include a cover.jpg file. The library Album Art setting should allow local data to be used:

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And yet, any kind of rescan or metadata refresh will not give these albums the right artwork.

What’s extra weird is I have some other obscure albums which cannot be Matched, and they don’t have this problem. The embedded covers appear in Plex just fine.

I know I can just manually fix this but I want to figure out how to make Plex comply. Any ideas?

2

Does this mean that they do get some artwork?
When you edit the album, is the right cover art among the choices?

3

The albums inherit the artist art. The artist art was not looked up–obscure artist, remember–so I added an artist jpg to Plex myself. Now all that artist’s albums get that art instead of no art.

Except one album, which DOES for some reason display the correct album art, even though it isn’t matched either. It must have gotten it from the tag or cover.jpg.

I’m gonna Plex Dance again and start from scratch, this time without adding Artist art manually.

Edit: Did Plex Dance. On re-adding the artist I found that I COULD match the artist. However all the albums save one still inherited the artist image instead of using local assets. Weird. I gave up and just dragged and dropped the cover files but if there’s something else to try I will check it out.

4

Could you detail the folder structure? From the library root down to the folder where the tracks are stored, please.

5

Here it is, thanks for taking a look @OttoKerner.

“music” circled in green is the root folder of the music library. Wise Owl is the Artist, Wise Owl - Country Down is the album.

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I know the spec is:

Music/ArtistName/AlbumName/TrackNumber - TrackName.ext

Perhaps this doesn’t qualify as a legit name. I do have the artist in front of the album name. And my track numbers all use a leading digit for the disc number. But, I use this format on almost all my stuff and there are only a handful of albums which have a problem pulling covers from local data.

While I am here let me test the super duper proper Plex manner. I did the Plex Dance and replaced the album named as below.

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Upon rescanning, Plex again gave the Country Down album the Artist art and did not pick up the cover from the tag or cover.jpg.

One last test… let’s rebuild the cover tag data.

Now it gets interesting. As interesting as such a dull topic can be, anyway.

I found that the album Country Down uses different images in each of the 3 tracks! Maybe Plex doesn’t handle that well, maybe something else is still going on. Shouldn’t it fall back to the cover.jpg file anyway?

But, other albums from this artist which failed to get cover art are not like that, each track has the same cover.

With mp3tag, I’m going to rebuild the cover tags for the album Please Baby Please, copying in the cover.jpg file, which I have no reason to believe is a bad file. I will also give the album 100% kosher Plex naming.

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After the Plex Dance… This album does not show the cover art from the tags or cover.jpg. It still uses the artist image. So, something is screwy.

I was prepared to be just out of luck due to my nonstandard naming system, even if it works everywhere else but these albums… but none of this makes sense.

Any ideas? :person_shrugging:

6

Your regular naming schema should work, as long as your embedded meta tags are in order.

Can you show me an overview over the embedded meta tags, similar to this:

mp3tag_multidisc_album
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Is “Prefer local meta tags” activated?

Does this library use the “Plex Music” agent at all?

7

Great!

Here’s the mp3tag overview. This is for the 100% literal Plex naming standards version as that is what’s currently in the library.

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Definitely! I just triple checked.

Scanner and Agent are both “Plex Music.” … That’s OK though, right, you can have a library with lookup-able and unlookup-able music?

8

You might want to check the folder for hidden image files, typically created by iTunes or WMP. I recently had this same trouble, and resolved it by deleting out thousands of thumbnail images that I could only see after I enabled seeing hidden files in Win10 Explorer’s settings (Options > “Change folder and search options”).

After a metadata refresh, the albums defaulted to the tagged covers. Lately I’ve also been having plex default to any images in a “scans” or “artwork” subfolder, passing over the tagged cover as well as the cover.jpg in the folder with the music files.

9

Good idea, thank you! Sadly, nothing was hidden.

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