Let me put my fundamental question first, and then go into more detail.
How does “genres from embedded tags” work. I have all of my tracks tagged with a genre, and an album, but my plex library isn’t setting the Album Genre as I would expect. From what embedded tag specifically does Plex look when this setting is enabled?
More details:
I have finally committed to using Plex as my media player. I have a large, carefully curated music library on my Synology NAS. All is tagged “correctly” (as in, how I want my music organized). I have the library imported, “prefer local metadata” selected, and genres from “embedded tags”. I did do a “Refresh all Metadata” after making those setting.
I make heavy use of the “genre” tag, which is part of the per-track mp3 metadata. I want to be able to create a smart playlist, containing all tracks with a particular genre. Now it seems that Plex only has the concept of Album genre and Artist genre, but no Track genre. I don’t want to use Artist genre, as I have many compilation albums whose artist is “Various Artists” (and obviously covers many different genres).
However, when I search via Album genre, I only see a very small number of albums. For example, my “Lounge” genre has approximately 50 albums, but only 7 show up when I search for Album Genre = “Lounge”.
I’m happy to go and bulk-modify my mp3 tags. For example, if I need to add a new mps tag to all tracks currently tagged with a particular genre.
There are a couple of issues going on here. The first is that recent builds of ffmpeg (which Plex uses for reading this information from mp3 files) has a bug where it only grabs the first genre it sees, if the embedded genres are separated by null characters (the latest ID3 standard). If they are separated by semicolons, ffmpeg/Plex will grab all of the genres. This problem seems to exist only for .mp3 files. It isn’t a problem in .flac files, for instance. There is a fix in the ffmpeg pipeline for this, but who knows when it will land in a stable release. It apparently isn’t in the just-released version.
The second is that Plex doesn’t support the concept of track-level genres (there’s a feature request about this). For albums, it grabs the genres of the first track in the album and applies those tags to the album. This is something that Plex is reportedly working on changing.
There’s a fairly long discussion of these issues here, if you’re interested in reading the history:
Thanks for the reply @beckfield . For compatibility reasons, I only ever use one genre per track, so the multi-genre thing is not my issue (I actually wanted to go multi-genre years ago, but whatever program I was using at the time couldn’t handle that). I may have an album or two that have tracks with different genres, but for the most part, all tracks in an album should have the same genre tag. Your explanation is clear though, and it is exactly how I had hoped the genre tags should work (i.e. just grab the first track genre, and apply it as album genre).
I did a little more digging, by creating a new library, ensuring the settings (prefer local metadata and from embedded tags) were correct from the beginning, and adding just a subfolder where most of the albums are. That one worked fine, but despite doing all I could to force the original library to re-read the metadata, it still isn’t correct.
So, I’m just going to brute-force it, delete the library, and re-create it with the settings correct from the start. Looks like that should solve my issue.
