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How do I prevent Plex from overwriting all my manually changed metadata when importing new music? (Windows)
Metadata should go into the embedded meta tags of your files. Plex will not touch these, ever.
In order to have Plex actually obey these embedded meta tags, you need to enable “prefer local metatags” in the properties of your Plex music library.
But if you do that, you better ensure that all your music is tagged correctly to a minimum.
Here is a list of other threads where the MO is explained further: Album artist incorrectly set as AC/DC for thousands of tracks - #3 by OttoKerner
This should prevent Plex from “overwriting” your metadata:
AFAIK you will have to rescan/refresh your library afterwards.,
In my case (for the second time), I created some, not all (but a few hundred) metadata manually because Plex did not recognize them correctly (or not at all, because they are in-house productions). When Plex then searched for new files, it did a complete rescan and all the manually created data was gone
As I explained above, you need to create those metadata in your files. Plex will not touch your files, so it cannot remove these metadata from the files.
DO NOT add metadata directly within Plex. These exist only in Plex’s own database and are not written back into the files.
Use a file format from which Plex can actually read metadata.
e.g. WAV: not usable
FLAC/ALAC: usable
Ok, I did not know that. Thank you!
Kind of a crappy system though if it allows you to add and change meta data and not write it back. Very annoying with a music library of moren than 10.000 albums 
There is a case for this hands-off approach, which Plex is operating under. It’s just that this is not what you expected.
If your music is stored in a good folder structure and has sensible file names, you can actually use these to generate good basic metadata semi-automatically.
Apps like mp3tag can perform all sorts of file/folder name parsing to generate metadata from them.
Let’s say you are well organized with a folder structure like
/Music
/AlbumArtist
/AlbumTitle
01 - Track Title.flac
02 - Track Title.flac
03 - Track Title.flac
...
You can generate almost every meta tag you need from this.
Album Artist, Album Title, track title, track number
are the minimum you’ll need in Plex.
OK, as you can imagine in a huge library like this (which is grown over a decade now) it is not that well sorted.
The thing that suprised me was thatPlex never did that before (in years), and now two times in a row
That’s how my own looked like as well, many years ago.
You may find that you can enjoy your music better if it’s well organized. In particular it helps Plex to find the right metadata (if those can be found online) and extract the right clues about what belongs where, so it can not only make your collection look better, but also generate play lists and radios automatically for you.
That applies to many other media player/manager/media servers as well. So, no matter what you will be using in the future, you will profit from a little bit of effort.
Particularly if you value having your own collection of music.
I echo this sentiment, just get it done, I had a music collection which was heavily influenced by iTunes and was uploaded and matched with Apple Music, it took a bit of work to decouple myself from streaming when I went all in on Plex, many days, tagging, matching with Picard, cleaning up MusicBrainz entries, but it was worth it. To have everything organised, elegantly tagged, leveled and sonic analysed.
And i did it all on an intel computestick, so… many days… 
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