How to sort out messy Music collection?

General Discussions
1

I have a fairly large collection of Music some from iTunes and others from many other sources. Many have wrong metadata, but the one’s from iTunes (better metadata and folder structure) has trouble finding the album and sometimes also the artist. Is there a way to force sonic finger printing for all media? What some ways in which I could solve unknown artists and albums from appearing?

2

In my signature, you’ll find the links to the documentation about how to structure and name your media files.

There are a number of tools out there. For music, you also have Music Brainz’s Picard. I use this tool on Linux.

Picard will scan the file, get a ‘fingerprint’ and look it up by that fingerprint. It will then retrieve all the artist & album data associated with it.

3

Hi thanks for the response. Unfortunately, as said, some of my music has the wrong tags. I have used Tagscan to start obtaining the right tags for the songs. However, it seems that Plex only scans the new image linked to the file and not the tags which means the title, artist, album etc… stays the same (I have tried doing both a refresh and update library). I can verify that these parameters are not locked on Plex. Is there a way I can trigger Plex to re-scan the tags without creating a completely new library? Also it seems that, even though I have Plex pass, it doesn’t seem to be using the sonic fingerprint, is there a way I can force it to use it?

Also will give Music Brainz’s Picard as go…

4

If you look in Chuck’s signature area, there is another link called “The Plex Dance.” This outlines a workaround for the bug where Plex won’t update metadata that has already been scanned.

As for sonic fingerprinting, I have found reliance on any of the online metadata services (last.FM, Gracenote, etc.) to be so unreliable as to be unusable. I highly recommend using Picard, or MP3Tag, or any tag editor you prefer, to get your ID3 tags whipped into shape. It’s a lot of work up front, but this is far more reliable in my opinion, and once you’re caught up, it’s easy to stay caught up.