I would like to improve the quality of my music metadata in Plex using an automated tool. Basically everything is organized and identified correctly now, I’m just not satisfied with the depth of metadata for most of the tracks/albums. Primarily, I’d like to see improvement in the moods, styles, and genres. Timed lyrics would be a bonus! Some tracks are lacking metadata and some are just missing (mostly more obscure tracks, but some are not). I am willing to pay for a premium service so I’m thinking about something like MediaMonkey or Music Tag. But I am NOT looking to leave the Plex ecosystem, and I love PlexAmp, so whatever path I go I need it to improve the quality of my Plex metadata in an automated way. Any suggestions?
Picard - https://picard.musicbrainz.org/
I find it easy to use. If you’re confident the metadata it pulls in (from MB) is correct for your files, and you don’t wish to add/change anything, you can speed through a lot of albums quickly. But it also has plenty of options to give you finer control and add whatever metadata you want to add. I only use it for metadata but it can also rename/organise your files/folders.
Styles come from allmusic.com only. I am not aware of any meta tags which could supply them into Plex.
Genres are AFAIK merged from all tracks and stored only once, on the album. Not on individual tracks in Plex.
There might be some tools which can query some lyrics websites and write the results as .txt or .lrc files beside the audio files. (this is the only way to get them into Plex, if you don’t want to use the integrated LyricsFind access https://support.plex.tv/articles/215916117-adding-local-lyrics/ )
Unfortunately, most lyrics websites nowadays are ad-infested money earning schemes, which don’t allow external API access. And some tools which promise to fetch lyrics come laden with unwelcome additions like ad-bots.
Be careful.
I’m confused. Where do moods come from? I assume they come from AllMusic because that site has moods. But the contents of that site do not match my music metadata and refreshing the metadata does not fix this. Take “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC. In my Plex that track has zero moods and only a “Pop/Rock” genre. Yet on AllMusic there are many moods listed:
I don’t see moods on MusicBrainz:
https://musicbrainz.org/release/ecc5dddd-268a-4bcf-aa0b-affb3b6c8ffc
Is there something wrong with my Plex server? Maybe my complete lack of any moods on roughly 6% of my library is due to a configuration issue? I do NOT have “prefer local metadata” selected.
It’s so weird. Many of my tracks have moods associated with them, but random ones do not and even though I can see that allmusic.com has moods associated with that track, doing a Plex metadata refresh for that album does not find those track moods. In the case of Thunderstruck I have tried re-matching that album too. Any idea what is going on?
I found this article: https://support.plex.tv/articles/correcting-your-music-content-matches/
Which states that in order for an album to be matched to moods then the MusicBrainz page for that album must have an “external link” to AllMusic. Doing some digging I found that the album for Thunderstruck (The Razors Edge) just happens to NOT have that link. I chose that track because it is so popular I thought it must have all the features but apparently that is not true.
So I picked another that doesn’t have that issue. The AFI album “Sing the Sorrow” in my Plex is matched to MusicBrainz using the MBID. The album already has mood metadata on my Plex for all songs except for the last song. But AllMusic has mood metadata for this last track, so why is it missing? Refreshing the album metadata does not retrieve the missing mood data.
I’m willing to use the Picard tool, but since I cannot get Plex to fix missing metadata manually then I don’t think adding MBID metadata to my files will do anything. But I’m still probably not understanding something about this process.
So I’ve completed my process of using Picard to identify all of the unmatched albums on my Plex server, and a large handful of others. The number of songs without moods went from 2548 tracks to 2493 tracks, but honestly a small number of those were just from deleting some tracks that I was no longer interested in. Only 36 of 1071 albums are unmatched yet 43% of my library has no moods. So yeah, the issue is poor quality metadata sources.
I noticed in my Plex servers settings a section for an experimental feature for metadata agents! Is this usable at all? Could this potentially be used to pay for better metadata? Sounds like a great income source for Plex!
