Server Version#:1.26.1.5798-99a4a6ac9
Player Version#:
Just discovered the “Fix Match” and “Match” features of Plex for my music library, which is immensely helpful in repairing incorrect listings in my library. I am using local metadata as I have lots of non-commercially released content (concerts) and have already curated the ID3 tags. I understand that Musicbrainz is the source for the supplemental artist and album data, but I wasn’t able to find anything on their site about artist artwork.
When Plex matches content to a Musicbrainz-defined artist, there is a piece of artwork that gets associated. But in a couple of instances, this art is either incorrect or subpar. For example: the alt-rock band Belly (early 90s, Boston-based, headed by Tanya Donelly) has the correct description and other info from Musicbrainz, but the picture is of Palestinian-Canadian rapper Belly (early aughts), and I can’t find a way to refresh this aspect of the data. Is there a source where this can be fixed, or do I need to manually overwrite the artist artwork?
Music / <-- folder which is added to the music library
|--Albumartistname /
| artist-poster.jpg <--- a photo of the artist
| artist-background.jpg <--- a background/wallpaper particular to the artist
|--Albumtitle /
cover.jpg <--- album cover
background.jpg <--- album background/wallpaper [if not present, inherited from the 'albumartist' level]
1. Trackartist - Tracktitle.mp3
1. Trackartist - Tracktitle.txt
2. Trackartist - Tracktitle.mp3
2. Trackartist - Tracktitle.lrc
...
Thanks - this will be helpful if I decide to override the default pic with my own. But what about fixing the default artwork at the source? I imagine other people have music by the band Belly in their library, are all of them overriding this incorrect jpg of a Canadian rapper?
As I understand it, Plex sends all requests for metadata, including images, to MusicBrainz. MB doesn’t store artist images, but they farm the request out to other sources, like fanart.tv, Last.FM, etc. (I don’t know the full list).
This basically means you have to figure out where MB is getting the art. AFAIK, the only way to do that is to follow all the external links associate with the artist until you find the artwork that Plex is actually retrieving. The problem could be that the ultimate source (Last.FM, for example) has the wrong image for the artist, or the external link in MB is linking to the wrong artist at Last.FM.
Unfortunately, Belly has a pretty long list of external links. Some will be more obvious choices than others – I wouldn’t expect it to be coming from IMDB, for example.
If someone from Plex can provide more details here (or if I’m totally off-base), that would be helpful.
Thanks, this is quite helpful. I went through all the links on Musicbrainz, and found a couple of dead ones which I reported. I suspect last.fm is the culprit. The page for Belly there lists both the rapper and the alt-rock band, and the photos (also mixed) include the one that is showing up in Plex. It appears this is a known issue on last.fm, that the site is unable to distinguish between artists with the same name, and they even recommend editing the biography to include both (!). Not sure why Plex chooses to prioritize images from this site when it has such a significant structural flaw to it, perhaps the developers could consider whether other less ambiguous sources would be a better fit for the algorithm that chooses the default artist photo.
Perhaps also of interest - the bio in Plex is not sourced from last.fm, but rather allmusic.com. I would suggest that site may be a better match universally for initial photo downloads than last.fm.
I’m also considering reporting the last.fm link on Musicbrainz for potential removal - if the link is ambiguous, it may not be suitable for use in a database that populates so much data across platforms. Maybe last.fm will finally get around to fixing their site if people start removing their links (wishful thinking, I’m sure).
Yup, I asked a couple years ago “What comes from where?” I was told that AllMusic was the intended source for bio info, Last.FM for “popular tracks” data, and fanart.tv for graphics (other than album covers, which come from MusicBrainz, if they have it).
Each of those will fall back to other services, but I don’t know details about that. Most of the artist bios in my library come from AllMusic, but a few, where there is no artist bio in AllMusic, have bios from Last.FM.
Interesting - I didn’t look at fanart.tv before because they weren’t linked from Musicbrainz. But they have separate pages for the two Bellys, and neither has anything under “Artist Thumb”, which upon checking a few other artists seems to be where Plex is getting pics. Maybe because it’s empty it’s defaulting back to last.fm. I’ll try uploading a file to Artist Thumb and see if that does the trick.
An update on this… I was able to successfully upload an artist image to fanart.tv, so now there is something for Belly (the band) in Artist Thumb. However, it’s been over a week, and still no change in the artist art in Plex - Belly the rapper persists. I’ve been refreshing the metadata on the artist page almost daily. Any other suggestions how to trigger the update?
Thanks, just gave that a try. Unfortunately, after re-adding the files and scanning again it brought back the rapper thumbnail. Do you suppose Plex caches any “version” of fanart.tv centrally and not just on individual clients? That might mean waiting for some periodic update on Plex’s part.
I understand that there is a review process after new artwork has been uploaded to fanart.tv. Your uploads probably must be cleared first. Or they may get rejected if they don’t reach the minimum required quality.
This is true and my first attempt was denied due to insufficient documentation of the copyright. But I re-submitted a day later and it went through within another day, and has been live on fanart.tv for close to two weeks now.
We are coming up on a month now since I successfully uploaded an artist thumb to the Belly page of fanart.tv. I just did the Plex Dance again, and the default image continues to be the rapper, not the band.
Another thought occurred: I know musicbrainz.org contains links to other sources of data, but I don’t see fanart.tv listed on the Belly page (or any others on some spot-checking). How does Plex distinguish between the two fanart.tv pages - the one for the rapper and the one for the band? Each has their own listing on the site, and the one for Belly the rapper does not contain an artist thumb - which according to the logic we’ve sketched out above, would default the image search to last.fm, and the indistinguishable listings for the two acts. Would adding the fanart.tv link to the musicbrainz.org page cause Plex to use that link to check for art? Or is this coded somewhere else in its internal logic?
I will add the link to musicbrainz just to see and report back, but curious if anyone has better awareness of how this is determined.
Hi all - an update for those who are interested. I made the changes noted above to musicbrainz.org, but didn’t see any changes over the next couple of weeks. Today, I went to update Plex Media Server on my Asustor NAS, but the app failed to update. I ended up removing it and reinstalling. After doing so, I went to check Belly’s artist photo in my library, and the correct one was there. Was it a matter of time before the photo updated, or did my uninstall and reinstall of the app trigger a cleansing of metadata that the Plex Dance did not? I don’t know, but the problem is resolved at least.
