My music collection on my NAS is managed by mp3tag and I tag my “favourite” trags using the comment tag and also by inserting a #+# string at the end of the file name.
I’m running a Pi Plex server and what I’m trying to do is figure out how to get this information into Plex so I can create playlists around my favourite tracks. I know how to configure Plex to use the local metadata but none of the fields other than title, artist, album, track, disk etc. are coming through and visible in plex. Is there a tag field I can use for this? Obviously I could mess with the track titles but that’s really ugly.
As it stands, the only thing I can think of is to create a seperate folder of my favourite music and only put that in the Plex library, but I think I must be missing somethign - surely Plex does a better job with tags than this?
Unfortunately, Plex does not read the comment tags in a file. I don’t know of any method to help with what you are doing.
it doesn’t have to be the comments tag - I’m happy to put the information in almost any tag. I even thought of setting the disc # to 99 but that information doesn’t seem to get passed through either.
The disc information should work, but that’s not going to help identify them to create a playlist.
I think the best way would be to take these tracks and actually remove all the embedded information. Then you can organize them into a single folder and have Plex treat it as 1 large random album. If you want everything organized properly by artist/album as Plex wants to do, there isn’t any tag that can be used to then help create a playlist.
ok thanks. I’ll think about that approach. Its frustrating that all of the Plex type services (amazon music, youtube music) all seem to allow you to add ratings to your music, but there’s no way to pass in the ratings youv’e already tagged the tracks with. Seems to me that it’s one of the most important pieces of information about any given track… sigh.
Ratings should get imported and you can make a playlist based on the rating.
there is no ratings tag in the ID3 standard afaik. If there is mp3tag, picard and musicbee do not let you set it. Have you found a way to do this?
Ah you are correct, you can’t put ratings into an mp3 file. Sorry, I’m not a big music user.
Doing some research it appears that ratings are stored locally by whatever program you use. There isn’t a way to transfer these from one service to another.
However, if you also use iTunes. Plex will import your ratings from there. That’s the only outside program PMS works with.
thanks for that. I don’t use iTunes but perhaps I could. if it allows me to filter my collection on some other tag (comment, mood, disc # whatever) then I can set a rating on those tracks and upload them. I’ll investigate. Thanks again.
eeeek. I had forgotten what a terribly designed app iTunes is, and how much baggage it brings with it. But setting aside how horribly unintuitive the UI is, there is no way to filter my collection on any useful attribute, so that’s a bust.
I think the simplest (not that it’s simple) answer is to load my library in two parts, firstly load up the “favs” and then label them all in Plex. That’s assuming that Plex will allow me to select multiple tracks and set a rating… something I hadn’t checked 
and then load in the rest, and thereafter as I add new material laboriously set the ratings twice - once in mp3tag and once in Plex.
I find it odd that I’m the only one who wants to do something like this, maybe it’s because I’m old and I started collecting music in digital form back in the 90s on Napster so I have a huge legacy of stuff all meticuloulsy tagged.
just to close this one off, in case anyone is interested. i found a way to do this but it’s messy.
- step one - use mp3tag (best tag editor imho) to add a “label” to the file name. mp3tag allows you to rename your files according to rules based on the tags e.g. artist-album-track-tracknumber. I’ve used the comment tag to store a rating, and I create file names which add “#+#”, "#++#"at the end of the file name according to the rating.
- step two - search for all the music files with a given tag in the file name and copy them to a folder. This will create a flat folder with all the files in it.
- Log on to your Plex server (a Pi in my case), mount that folder and then go to Plex admin and add that as your music file.
- wait overnight for it to load into Plex
- select all your music and give it a rating e.g. 5 stars.
- Go back to your Plex server, unmount the folder with the favourites only, and mount the folder with everything in it (which is presumably organised into folders by artist and album).
- Log back into plex and trigger a rescan of your music. The ratings will persist despite the fact that the music is organised differently in the folder, and all the “non-favourites” will appear (as un-rated).
- Thereafter when adding new music to your collection rate it manually in Plex once it appears.
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