Server Version#: 1.20.4.3517
Player Version#: Any/all
Can anyone give me some tips on how to actually get LMA to work with my music collection?
I’ve tried adding a music folder to Plex a bunch of times in the past, but I’ve never been able to get it to work properly. The main thing I’ve been struggling with is forcing Plex to actually recognize Local Media Assets, pulling info from the tags instead of downloading incorrect and/or potato-quality stuff from its online sources. Like, I’ll add an obscure EP from an artist, and instead of using my nice, high-rez artwork (both embedded and in the album folder as a sidecar .JPG file), it scrapes a trash 50x50 pix piece of junk from somewhere online. I can go through and change the artwork and incorrect info manually, but, like, I’m 100% NOT going to be doing for literally thousands of albums using Plex’s clunky, inefficient tools, when I’ve just spent months already going through everything on my own.
Has anyone out there actually been able to get LMA to work properly? If anyone has been able to get their Plex music collection to work properly, can you please give me the full rundown of the settings I need to change in order to get this to work? Under Settings > Agents, I’ve already got Local Media Assets at the top of the stack in both Artists and Albums (Personal Media and LastFM). I only have two items on those lists: Local Media Assets and Personal Media. I’ve completely deleted the music Library from Plex a couple of times over the years, rebuilding it from scratch. No luck.
Adding some extra info:
Under the Music Library settings > Advanced, if I create a new test library using these settings:
Scanner - Plex Music Scanner Agent - Personal Media Artists Prefer local metadata Genres - Embedded Tags Album Art - Local Files Only
NO album art is downloaded and NO embedded tag info/artwork is used.
Using these settings, embedded tag info seems to be used, but Plex decides that it’s going to use scraped, potato-quality artwork.
Scanner - Plex Music Agent - Plex Music Prefer local metadata Genres - Embedded Tags Album Art - Local Files Only
Can anyone confirm that the “Prefer local metadata” and “Album Art - Local Files Only” settings actually… work? As far as I’ve been able to tell by running a ton of different tests it that they’re basically just placebo settings and don’t actually do anything.
Extract the cover art and name it cover.jpg. Put it into the folder of the album.
Make sure it is of good quality and large size (personally, I recommend at least 1,000 pixels).
Do also look for hidden .jpg thumbnail files in the folders where your music is. These are responsible for the “potato quality” pictures.
(you might have to enable visibility for “hidden” and “system” files to actually see them.)
Thanks for the reply, @OttoKerner! This definitely doesn’t work, though. As you can see from the screen cap I posted earlier, my organizational system is exactly as you described: embedded, high-quality artwork, high-quality sidecar file in .jpg format named “cover.jpg”. No additional hidden files, other than the Thumbs.db file. Plex is 100% full potato.
Good news, though! I spent a few days playing around with all of the different settings permutations for Plex Music albums, and managed to find a combination that does work! In case anyone else having the same problem stumbles upon this post, here’s a copy/paste of my settings:
As best I can tell, the “Prefer local metadata” and “Album Art” advanced settings seem completely borked. Plex Music Scanner (scanner) and Personal Media Artists (agent) also seem to be totally non-functional. I’ve been able to create a proper, working library by deleting my existing library and creating a new, fresh one with the following settings under the Advanced menu:
Scanner - Plex Music
Agent - Plex Music
Visibility - (whatever setting you prefer)
Album sorting - (whatever setting you prefer)
❏ Prefer local metadata ( unchecked )
Store track progress - (whatever setting you prefer)
❏ Include related content from shared libraries ( unchecked - may still work if this option is checked )
Artist bios - (whatever setting you prefer)
❏ Album Reviews and Critic Ratings - (whatever setting you prefer)
❏ Popular tracks - (whatever setting you prefer)
❏ Concerts - (whatever setting you prefer)
Genres - Embedded Tags
Album Art - Plex Music Only
This is the only way I’ve been able to get Plex to act as expected: using embedded tags and artwork. Any other combination of settings seems to force Plex into either scraping garbage data and artwork, or not doing anything at all (no artwork, no metadata for anything).
With the above settings, album art will come from Musicbrainz and not from your embedded metatags.
Did you look for “hidden” and “system” cover art files? You need to enable two different check boxes in the preferences of Windows file explorer to be able to see these.
All I can tell you is that with your suggested settings, I’m getting served up potato-quality artwork from wherever Plex decides to scrape it from, and that with the settings I’ve linked to above, the artwork actually looks decent. This happens with brand new files copied over into a fresh directory, so there’s no possibility of lingering junk files screwing up Plex’s metadata.
If you check out the screen caps in my previous posts, you can see in the folder view that there are no no hidden or system files in the directory, just thumbs.db, cover.jpg and the mp3 files.
Don’t know what to tell you, man. thumbs.db is a hidden, protected system file. If you look at the screen cap, that’s all that shows up in the folder. Fresh folder, with just the MP3s and album art copied into it.
I’ll humor you, though. Here’s the dance I spend a couple of days doing while trying to figure this out:
Deleting the entire Music library
Deleting the media stored on the drive (Windows 10 server)
Create a brand new folder, uniquely named (old folder: musictest01; new folder musictest02)
Copy test media into the folder (MP3s, cover art, all properly organized as per Plex’s suggested folder structure)
Create new Music library, modifying settings; point it at the fresh, new folder
Let Plex do its thing
There are no additional garbage files being added to these folders, except the ones potentially created by Plex. If that’s the case, and this is all an issue with Plex deciding to use absurdly small artwork pulled from hidden system files, then… why…? Why is Plex doing that? Why is Plex creating these teeny, tiny files, then deciding to use them instead of either the embedded artwork or the sidecar files? If “prefer local metadata” and “album art” actually worked as they were supposed to, why would Plex be preferring hidden system files?
It doesn’t create them, it merely uses them if they’re already there.
You are copying a folder here, right?
You are not selecting only the audio files and the proper, big album art file from within and only copy these (of course you don’t, who would do it this way?).
If the folder has already been copied from computer to computer and has been used with various music player apps (namely Windows Media Player), chances are high that it already contains such smallthumb.jpg etc album art.
Yes, these are the old legacy scanner/agent that was replaced by “Plex Music” a year ago. Lots of stuff is broken in that. To be honest, I have no idea why Plex still includes these.
OK, that makes sense. Still doesn’t explain why this isn’t working as you claim it should be.
Again, as you can see in the screen cap I posted earlier in the thread, though, there is no “smallthumb.jpg” in the folder; the only protected operating system file is “Thumbs.db”
I’ve had lots of troubles with this over the past year (see posts I’ve made on many other related threads), but I was recently able to structure my library to avoid any Plex matching which IMHO is a mess (LOVE all other aspects of Plex).
Direct message me if you want details on how I configured and rebuilt my library. I’ve been enjoying 100% of my own correct high quality cover art for the last two weeks for the first time in over a year of struggling with this mess of “scanners” “match unmatch” “Plex dance” etc.
Like many others who have posted related threads on mystery cover art behavior, this train wreck does not happen for us in JRiver or other systems.
Despite my negativity about this part of Plex, I absolutely love the rest of the system! So please put my brutal honesty in context.
I’d love any tips you could give me! DM-ing you now.
It’s a little absurd that the official line from Plex is “everything is totally fine with Plex music! What you’re just not understanding is that Plex is TOTALLY SUPPOSED TO use hidden system files that may or may not exist as artwork, in spite of the fact that all of the settings are telling Plex to prefer embedded artwork. Why on Earth would you expect Plex to use high-rez sidecar files named ‘cover.jpg’ instead of trash-quality hidden, protected operating system files that are named something completely different!?!??!”
Since I’ve been having issues with the normal ‘plex scanner’ since about two weeks ago, I deleted my library and am now using the ‘plex music scanner’. So I am having this issue, like the OP above, and trying to figure it out. On my test system, I am using all the settings the OP has described in their original post (everything setup to use my local tags/metadata/cover art). I have a file called cover.jpg in the artist folder (no other files) and Plex is not picking it up. I also tried other combinations that people have suggested on the web.
I want to use local metadata so I have control over how my music is displayed. If I see a problem, I fix it in my local metadata.
Within my folder called ‘311’, I have a folder called ‘311’. I had a file in there called folder.jpg which is the album art for that 311 album… Plex was not picking it up. I just now changed it to cover.jpg, did refresh metadata, and Plex is still not picking it up. It is the only jpg file in that folder.
Really I’m trying to get the artist artwork to appear as well as the album artwork.
I’m probably misunderstanding what you are trying to do, but this works for me.
The artist artwork has to be named “artist-poster.jpg” Exactly that. That file goes into the folder for the artist, not in an album. Album cover art is named cover.jpg or folder.jpg and goes into the specific album.
example screenshot from the folder “Heart” (artist)
Also make sure you have the option to “Prefer local metadata” set. That way, your embedded metadata and posters are used first.
Here is what I have. I just now deleted my library > readded the library > I’m showing ALL files > extensions are showing > I have a cover.jpg in the album folder and an artist-poster.jpg and in the artist folder > refreshed metadata > attached is what is happening. I’m also the admin of my laptop.
Never fails. (cover.jpg or folder.jpg works for album art, completely interchangeable)
I use the Plex Music for the scanner and agent. It seems to work for me all of the time. I don’t have store track progress enabled, you should only use that for audiobook libraries regardless of what agent and scanner you use.
Every album I add to the music library works instantly, I don’t recall a failure. Even when there is no metadata available on any of the sites Plex uses to download the extra info ( if you enable that stuff in the advanced settings)
I’m not sure you’re files are named the way Plex expects them, something like my example would probably work better. File naming and folder structure are very important in a music library, as they are in other library types.
Prefer local metadata
Store track progress - (whatever setting you prefer)
