I’ve never used Plex for Music but wanted to give it a try. However, all my music got moved from Google PLay Music to the craptastic Youtube Music a while back. YT Music no longer has a way to download all my music and keep it in a nice format like I could before. So, I currently have all my music from YT music in one gigantic folder as that’s how YT does it.
Some of the tracks have tag info and some of them have nothing at all. I’ve been trying to use something like MediaMonkey to let it auto-tag the tracks but it’s a slow process which brought me to this post.
If I just dump a ton of music files into one folder and have Plex scan that folder, will it go online and check the fingerprints to figure out what titles, albums, genres, etc each song belongs to? If not, does it at least look at the tag of the files to then show them in the current album/title structure? Or, worst case scenario, do I have to manually reconstruct all the folders for the albums and things like that in order for Plex to have them show properly?
Plex won’t identify your music by some hash or soundprint. You’ll get the best results by following Plex folder structure / file naming schema. That being said you can configure a music library to use local assets (e.g. posters) and embedded metadata.
Edit:
Apps like FileBot can support adjusting those names/structures if needed
Plex won’t help you much, if at all. I just went through the same situation as you. The Google exporter is beyond horrible. Not just missing tags and putting all files in a single directory, but I wound up with many missing files so had to do the export numerous times to find them.
I used “Picard” to identify many of the files and tag them properly. It’s not fool proof and made many errors - I had to check and double check that it identified things properly.
I found myself having to do a LOT of manual identification and tagging.
I tried lots of solutions and started over from scratch many times. I found no graceful way of doing it. Sorry.
I will never put my purchased music in the cloud again.
Another bit of special sauce that’s critical to identifying harder-to-recognize tracks is audio fingerprinting, a magical technology that “listens” to a few seconds of the track and searches for matches based on the actual audio instead of relying on file names or tags. For this, we turned to another open, crowd-sourced solution: AcoustID.
Well, I took a chunk of random songs and dumped them in a folder and made a Library from it but it only found one album. I guess it doesn’t download metadata if the songs aren’t in the needed folder structure.
Not sure I understand what you’re missing?!
Mind sharing some more details?
e.g. are those files with embedded metadata, how have you configured your library, what is/isn’t showing when you access your library using different display modes (e.g. by artist, album, track)
I then made a Library in Plex and pointed it at the Music folder to see if it would do anything with the files via their tags. When it was done scanning/updating, it only showed one album in the whole library.
I’m assuming this is because all the files are in one folder and Plex isn’t ‘smart’ enough to read the artist, album, etc tags and display the files that way instead of displaying them based on the folder they are in.
I guess I’m not sure what the point is of having tags on files if it doesn’t use them when it displays the songs and just uses the folder structure like it does for Movies and TV Shows.
Also, I tried changing it to prefer the local metadata and the personal media agent, and then refreshing and rescanning the library but nothing seemed to change. If I view the songs by Track, they all show up but all say Various Artists and the Some Enchanted Evening album.
To be super honest… you might be able to get things to work with perfect metadata (e.g. corresponding album / album artist – not just artist). This is however going to be a hit and miss business. Plex will perform significantly better if you go the extra mile and give your files some minimum folder organization so Plex can deal with them properly. FileBot is your friend when it comes to doing that for tons of files.
