Since I’m very new to Plex, I’m going through my Video & Music libraries to fix the missing items or mismatches.
I’ve pretty much finished the Movies section and that was pretty straight forward. Filtering by ‘Unmatched’, you could instantly see what to fix (strange names, missing posters, tags,…).
But in the Music library, when I sort by Unmatched/Albums…most of them look just fine?? I don’t get what’s wrong or missing with them? The posters are there, the artist and album names are there as are the tracks so…why are they flagged as Unmatched?
For artists on the other hand, there is a lot of work to be done but again, it shows (no poster, no bio/description).
Thanks,
Unmatched just means Plex couldn’t find a matching record at Musicbrainz. Plex may have found enough information in the files themselves to identify the albums without needing the online info. Do you have album and artist artwork stored locally?
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by album & artist artwork?
I have a big collection so I can’t vouch for every album I have but I know I’ve made a lot of effort in trying to have the tags correctly in the files, along with cover art.
Is that what you were asking?
I guess that would in fact explain why everything is there and correct but yet flagged as unmatched.
Kind of annoying if you want to find the really unmatched albums!
I’m now focusing on the artists info in Plex, and there I’m finding that if I switch from Plex to Last.fm as the scanner, I get a match almost every time for those currently unmatched artists!
Is there a way to select the last.fm as scanner and run it on a selection (my unmatched artists)?
Yes. If your tags and cover art are in good shape, then Plex can organize and play your music just fine whether it finds a match or not. Matching will only be useful for getting artist biographies, album descriptions, maybe lyrics.
You can choose Last.FM on a one-at-a-time basis by using the “Fix Match” feature, or for the whole library, but not for a selection, at least as far as I know.
I’m starting to wonder if I in fact it wouldn’t be better off if I rescanned everything with Last.fm since I’m so consistently getting a match when compared to Plex?
Is there a consensus on which is better?
I’d hate to go through a whole rescan only to be disappointed for a reason or another.
I gave up on all the online services long before Plex settled on Musicbrainz. I think which one is better is going to depend entirely on each individual’s library. MB may have better data in some cases, and Last.FM in others.
My library is thoroughly tagged and I have local artwork for artists and album covers, and Plex is configured to prefer local data over online services. I’ll say that, since I got my tags whipped into shape, Plex, using the newer “Plex Music” scanner, has provided the most accurate results yet, for me.
The new scanner is more accurate in setting up my libraries, but it’s also pickier about folder structure and file names, than the old scanner. That kinda doesn’t make sense to me – better tag support should allow Plex to be less reliant on file/folder structure, not more – but that’s how it is (on the bright side, a picky scanner identified a lot of mistakes in my tags, so it actually helped me out).
Plex still has a lot of work to do, especially for classical music, but I’m hopeful.
Can you confirm that Plex gets it’s “matched” data from MusicBrainz?
I am slowly adding my unmatched albums to the MusixBrainz database, but if it turns out that Plex in fact looks elsewhere I am not sure I will bother.
(Hopefully that makes sense!)
Do you know if there is an ‘Idiots guide’ to adding a release to MusicBrainz for Plex?
I have added a few but so far Plex still doesn’t match them.
I am not 100% sure if I am doing it correctly TBH!!
For example I added “Adam Faith – The Very Best Of” (2005) to MusicBrainz yesterday, but Plex still doesn’t seem able to match it.
