I’m usually using MP3Tag to do this and it works perfectly for all my FLAC files. I have the “Prefer local metadata” option enabled in my music library and Plex always correctly pulls it from the tags in the files.
However, now I created a new library for MKA files from Blu-ray Audio discs. Same process - I used MP3Tag to fill out all the columns - Title, Artist, Album, Album Artist etc. but for some reason, neither Plex, nor the Windows 10 Explorer recognize them. When I open the folder in Explorer, I see that it recognizes the “Title” attribute, but the “Album” and “Contributing Artists” columns are empty… yet it’s all there when I open those files in MP3Tag.
These are not MKV video files, these are MKA audio files.
Even though MKA is not listed on the supported list, they are definitely supported, they play correctly and are recognized correctly… IF I let Plex do this on its own. If I use the Plex Music agent, it recognizes them as an album with all the artwork, track names etc. BUT in this specific case I don’t want to use the automatic data because it uses slightly different track names.
Therefore, I want Plex to pull the data from the files’ tags, the same way it does in FLAC files.
Again, my question is specifically about tagging them and why those tags are not recognized by Windows 10 and by extension - by Plex, even though I used the same method as for FLAC files and I can see the tags in MP3Tag.
If my question is still unclear, please let me know what’s unclear about it and I’ll try to explain it better
Plex is not reading metadata tags from matroska files (MKV, MKA…).
If you want to tag them for their own good… there’s a full documentation on their homepage. However it’s a little tricky as it requires you to create XML files for the metadata and to mux that xml file into your MKV/MKA files.
I’m not aware of any tag editors as you might know them from other containers. https://matroska.org/technical/specs/tagging/index.html
@SE56 Yes, there are, and as mentioned in my first post, I enabled “Prefer local metadata” already. In fact, I used the same settings as in my other “Music” library.
Still, I believe the issue might be related with the fact that even Windows can’t see the “Album” and “Contributing Artist” content in the metadata even though I can see it through MP3Tag.
@tom80H Thanks a lot, that explains it. I’ll look into the XML + muxing method. As the famous last words say: “how hard can it be?”
—EDIT—
Actually, it might really be easier than a thought because I see that MKVToolNix has an option to upload an XML file as “Global tags”.
So far, I’m a bit at a loss… it kind of works… but it also doesn’t.
When I play a file in VLC and use the “Media Information” option, I can see that the original files have most of the information already entered - the Artist, the Album, Year, Genre, Track Number, but the “Title” is wrong. In fact, it’s identical in every file which is probably why Plex is confused by it.
If I mux the XML file I prepared into it, it seems to work to some extent, with “Title” once again being the exception. That is - whenever I modify the title in the XML file, the change is correctly being recognized by Windows Explorer while the Explorer still won’t see the album name or artist, but in VLC… the title remains incorrect when looking at the media info.
Strangely, even though VLC lets you edit this info and “Save metadata”. If I do it, it won’t actually save, it resets when I reopen the file. I don’t understand why VLC shows this one fixed “Title” that’s incorrect in each file, while Windows Explorer recognizes the correct title, yet it won’t see the rest while VLC does.
Anyway, I think this goes beyond Plex and I should probably post this on some general Matroska forum or Reddit. It’s very strange.
In that case we could have saved ourselves the effort of creating and embedding the xml tags. As stated above… I know of no app that’s saving tags into MKV files.
MKV tagging is tricky as even the apps that read it, produce different results – you will notice this if you include multiple “targets” in the XML file to reflect information on collection, album, title. In such a scenario, VLC will only show the last entry of each parameter (ignoring the leveled approach).
If you dig even deeper you will find that even the makers of Matroska format aren’t happy with the tagging as there’s logical inconsistencies.
As for the title not showing properly… how did you reflect this in your XML file?
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE Tags SYSTEM "matroskatags.dtd">
<Tags>
<!-- Album tags -->
<Tag>
<Targets>
<TargetTypeValue>50</TargetTypeValue>
<TargetType>ALBUM</TargetType>
</Targets>
<Simple>
<Name>TITLE</Name>
<String>Concrete and Gold</String>
</Simple>
<Simple>
<Name>ARTIST</Name>
<String>Foo Fighters</String>
</Simple>
<Simple>
<Name>DATE_RELEASED</Name>
<String>2017-09-15</String>
</Simple>
<Simple>
<Name>TOTAL_PARTS</Name>
<String>9</String>
</Simple>
</Tag>
<!-- Song tags -->
<Tag>
<Targets>
<TargetTypeValue>30</TargetTypeValue>
<TargetType>SONG</TargetType>
</Targets>
<Simple>
<Name>TITLE</Name>
<String>The Sky Is a Neighborhood</String>
</Simple>
<Simple>
<Name>PART_NUMBER</Name>
<String>4</String>
</Simple>
</Tag>
</Tags>
I figured it out. That’s more of an issue with VLC than my tagging efforts. It turns out that regardless of what’s in the “TITLE” attribute in my tags, even if it’s all set correctly, VLC will look at the Segment → Segment Information → Title property. This explains why my custom titles were always displayed correctly in Windows Explorer because it does actually look for the right tag.
My XML file looked pretty much the same as yours only without the because apparently they’re optional and setting the already defines whether the tags in this group are for an album or the individual track data although I think one of the dozens of tests included them as well.
After a few hours of experimenting with this, I eventually gave up and went with the “good old” manual edit route, that is - I’ve let Plex match all the data, picking one of the closest matches to what I was looking for and then manually edited whatever I wanted to change for each track so… mission accomplished and I’ve learned something about tagging MKV/MKAs
Also, none of this XML stuff was even necessary because when I checked all the tags/metadata through MKVToolNix’s Info feature (while trying to figure out where does VLC get the wrong title from), I saw that the files I modified with MP3Tag already had all the correct tags so technically you can use MP3Tag to modify this data in MKA files.
