I have many thousands of files. I can’t rename them all. It’s also useful to use the ‘tag from filename’ feature of tagging programs if something were to happen to the tags.
For the heck of it I renamed all of the files in the ‘from chaos’ folder, and the same issue occurred. I’ll probably just go back to Emby full time. It doesn’t seem to have any trouble.
Thanks though,
Sorry… it works very well for me.
I struggled a bit at first with music, created several “test” libraries with different agents and scanners to get it right, but it wasn’t really time consuming - it only required a few artists to determine what worked properly.
MP3tag will re-name files auto-magically, I’m sure most tagging software has the same capabilities.
Quite OK. Thanks. It was working fine a few weeks ago. Not sure what happened.
I spent an absurd amount of time going through my entire music collection, making sure that everything was properly named and tagged as per Plex’s best practices. I spent another month combing through every single folder and subfolder making sure that there were no hidden system files anywhere in the library, as per OttoKerner’s suggestion earlier in this post (spoiler alert: out of literally thousands of folders, I found maybe a dozen with low-rez hidden system files).
I’m not sure why people keep insisting that Plex’s music scanner isn’t completely broken, when it quite obviously is?
@major_briggs You’ll be MUCH happier with a different solution. I wouldn’t hold your breath for a fix from the Plex folks.
I created a batch file in windows to delete all of the hidden system file images. To be honest, I was convinced that Plex music was broken initially. but right now (finger crossed) I can add new stuff, it only uses my metadata (doesn’t even download extra album covers) and works (as near as I can tell) perfectly.
I don’t have a huge library by some standards, (about 1300 artists / 3000 albums / 14500 tracks) but it chugs along quite nicely. Not disagreeing with your problems. but they don’t exist with me. 
I noticed a Plex bug last night which could potentially be related. I can reproduce different cover art results based on the order in which I choose Scanner and Agent, for my libraries to get my cover art I have to FIRST select the Agent which implies the Scanner. If I select the Scanner (with the same setting that gets implied) before selecting the Agent then I get no cover art at all.
Seems like a simple UI bug regarding the values “sticking”. @OttoKerner it would be awesome if you could take a look at this and please contact me directly if you want me to demonstrate this, it is easy to reproduce.
I’m unclear when this bug first appeared because I just noticed it last night when I tried to add a new library.
I’m just guessing that maybe this bugginess is more pervasive on this UI screen, in which case perhaps other odd behavior is going on due to these settings being improperly stored. It would explain why some people have good results and others have bad results although their settings look the same.
Would you mind sharing your method? For software that I pay to use, Plex’s management of metadata is complete trash and should be an embarrassment to whomever is responsible. There is free software that does metadata management 10x better than Plex does.
Sure, I continue to enjoy 100% of my own cover art since figuring out the work around. I have no Artist artwork generated by Plex since I decided to try to avoid the matching engine altogether – so one downside of my method is that you don’t get any auto generated Artist artwork. This is ok for me since I put a much bigger emphasis on correct Album artwork and using Plex’s matching engine was a disaster for me for Album artwork. Note that I use my own embedded cover art (no sidecar files).
Here’s what I do when creating a new library.,
From the Advanced page do the following:
(1). Make sure to choose Agent = Personal Media Artists as the very first thing you do, this will set the Scanner to Scanner = Plex Media Scanner. If you choose the Scanner first then all bets are off, this is where there appears to be a clear Plex bug but I’ve not been able to find anyone at Plex to look into it.
(2). Make sure to turn on Prefer Local Metadata
(3). Make sure to set Album Art = Local Files Only
I think the other settings don’t impact the cover art situation.
Now, under the Agents section of the settings for the server, set the Albums setting to Local Media Assets at the top of the list with it’s flag turned on. Personal Media Albums second. I have NO idea what these settings mean and I don’t know if they make a difference with regard to cover art, but this is how I have them set.
And I do agree with you, although I love Plex and Plexamp, many people are extremely frustrated with this meta data section of Plex. In fact, a couple years ago it worked well, so they are just missing the point that something got broke along the way and the code needs a complete rethink. Not to mention that the names for all these settings are completely confusing.
Good luck!
Let us know how it goes
I’ve been having a lot of issues with my music library as well, getting the same issues with local metadata and assets not displaying that Sprongfeld was getting. Gretschguy’s method IS the solution, but, also shows that Plex’s scanner/agent is broken to a degree. You MUST select the Agent first when creating the library, not the Scanner. What a weird glitch that Plex seems to be oblivious to.
Is there a better way to report this bug than here? It’s easy to reproduce but not getting any attention? @elan @OttoKerner
So here’s a question, if those tiny system files are hidden and created by WMP, and not used as system thumbnails, then why are there images in music folders I have that I bought from Bandcamp, embedded tags in, and have never touched WMP?
Even if that were the case, why still does Plex prefer those instead of the actual embedded artwork like it’s told to do? No other media player has this issue, something in Plex is broken. People have been having this issue for years, and I’ve gotten to the point of just not using Plex for music at all.
The fact you have to do that should be indicative of the problem in the first place.
Personally I’ve been using MusicBee with my own smaller library, and never have I had to go in and delete hidden system files because it actually works properly and reads the correct files and/or embedded cover art. And that’s made by literally a single person for a completely free app. I can also do a network media share and have all of the correct tags and artwork show up, while still having those hidden system files. At my dad’s shop it works great between all his PC’s, but Plex and Emby are just about the only things that will do music streaming to the living room TV.
Emby also actually works properly, but will compress all of your artwork down to 600x600 instead of the default 1000x1000 my library uses.
@Gretschguy
I’ve done as you suggested with my smaller personal library as a test, and it mostly works. I also did as mentioned by @OttoKerner and deleted the hidden system cover files. Some albums just don’t have album art, and a number of them didn’t pull any information other than track name. At this point I’m just resigned to the fact that Plex is broken and they have no interest in fixing it.
JZStudios, just to be clear, I would like to see Plex fix this as well.
The UI bug in creating a library that I describe above is easy for me to reproduce FWIW. I’m just not sure how to get any attention on it???
Fixing the bug may not fix all the issues here but it would be a good start and might uncover other problems.
I’m able to use 100% of my own cover art and artist images with the method I described above, but I’d prefer to lean on Plex for the artist images if I could, but right now using any part of the Plex matching wreaks complete havoc in my library , probably because I have so many similarly named albums across libraries and within the same library. The similarly named albums is a massive problem with Plex, such as two editions of the same CD or having the CD and LP rip in the same library.
If anyone knows someone at Plex who would be willing to do a call or zoom with me to demonstrate the bug, I’d be glad to help.
At this point I’m convinced they don’t care. If one guy can make an app for free that does it properly there’s not a lot of reason that Plex can’t, and people have been having this issue for years. I think Plex just wants to focus on movies.
Just for the record, all of my music is correctly organized as Plex wants, and correctly tagged through MusicBrainz Picard and MP3tag. Yet, still for some reason it has albums it can’t find info for, despite the fact that all of the info is embedded in the tag. It’s broken. Also when creating the music library it crashed every few minutes so I had to keep restarting it, and then it decided to not play back anything at all. So at this point I’m just going to rebuild the libraries and once again skip the music because Plex can’t seem to make it work.
Exactly. I asked that question months ago, and was only met with a strange insistence that I had hidden system files in my directories, even though I supplied screen caps that very clearly showed that there were none. Why is Plex programmed to prefer hidden system files over both clearly labelled sidecar image files AND embedded artwork? That makes zero sense.
Thanks for all of your hard work on this @Gretschguy. I’ve tested your solution with small segment of my library, and it’s working well so far. I’ve been using PlexAmp, and it’s… not great. Between the bafflingly obtuse UI and, frankly, absurd functionality omissions (no volume control… ?! No Windows chrome, so no way to close the app…?! WAT. Are you for real?) I don’t know if it’s even worthwhile for me to bother adding my entire library.
I think @JZStudios hit the nail on the head: Plex absolutely does not care. It’s absurd that they have no reply for your easily reproducible bug report. Like, not even a boilerplate “thank you, we are looking into the report of insert bug report title here. We appreciate your patience.”
In fairness to Plex, I guess, very few people actually buy digital music any more, and only a handful of old folks like me bother maintaining their expansive existing music collection. Everyone else just hops on Spotify. There probably isn’t a lot of mileage left in fixing longstanding issues like this. Much better to focus on flashy, NEW features that nobody will use, like, VR support.
So, as Otto or whoever mentioned, there’s “hidden” files and “Hide protected operating system files” as separate options. Unchecking the latter will show the WMP thumbnails which you can then delete, and Plex will then… almost work. For some reason multiple artists have been split in 2 or more for absolutely no reason, which is cool, and the auto genres are laughably bizarre. Why is Frank Zappa considered classical alongside Gershwin?
But the cool thing is, once again, nothing else has this issue. Plex claims it prioritizes the embedded tags (And has an option so it will only read from tags, which obviously is broken) and jpegs with a specific naming scheme. The tiny WMP thumbnails are neither of those. So why it prioritizes something which fits neither of it’s matching criteria is far beyond my comprehension.
I think Plex is just focused on video, which it does more or less perfectly fine. I still don’t know why I can’t search/sort movies by audio channels for the 5.1 system, but it otherwise works fine. The Music segment is just such broken garbage I can’t believe they care about it at all.
Oh god, they actually have VR support. That’s depressing.
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