I am in the process of adding my music library using a ripping workstation to pull all of the content from my CD’s. I’m just getting started and have hit an issue that I’m sure will come up again, and I’m looking for some input on how to handle it.
When I ripped one of my discs, it didn’t match up with the external database and got written to disk as “Unknown Artist/Unknown Album”. I’ve managed to get the album art squared away and such by editing the data of the item and correcting the artist and album title. The tracks are present and play fine, but they are “Track 01”, “Track 02”, etc.
Will Plex ever update the tracks to the correct names or do I simply have to rename the files manually? What about renaming the directories that the content is stored in? Will Plex rename those according to the artist and album title that I’ve set? When?
My ripping tools seems to be fairly reliable, so I don’t expect this will happen often. When it does, however, I’d like to understand the best way to deal with it.
Whenever something like the above happens, I recommend you to use some external metadata tool to embed proper meta tags into your files and to rename the files.
(I don’t know many Linux solutions for this, but Kid3 mentions it can do that.) https://kid3.sourceforge.io/
Triggering a library update will then incorporate the renamed files into Plex.
I kind of thought it wouldn’t move, manage, rename, or otherwise manipulate them but I wanted to be sure.
I’m not worried about the metadata as my ripping workstation is pretty accurate when ripping. So, for now, I’ll just plan to rename the files and folders manually and update the library.
Although you’re not aware of many linux tools for embedding metadata, what about ones for Mac? I’ve reset everything after a complete rename, and even with the track names in place, they still show in Plex as “Track 01”, “Track 02”, etc. Seems metadata is going to be necessary here…
The re-import, with all proper names, still dumped it in as “Unknown Artist” and “Unknown Title” and the track names were very basic…
I downloaded Kid3 for Mac and was able to use it immediately (zero learning curve) as I’ve used Tag Editors in the past. It has the ability to edit tags in batches, too. So, I was able to set the artist and album info for every track in one sweep, then I just needed to update the track names.
Moved the directory out of the library, scanned the library, emptied trash, moved the directory back, scanned the library and it imported properly right from the start with all correct info (including track names).
