I am in the process of reorganizing the tags of my music library to facilitate creating smart playlists based on the genre tag by appending custom, semicolon-delimited values to the contents of the existing genre tag.
I currently have the library set to prefer local metadata and to use the locally-embedded genre tag. I know that it’s possible within plex to log certain metadata tags by selecting/editing the individual track and clicking the padlock icon. This is supposed to prevent Plex from modifying such tags during a metadata refresh. I want to lock the genre tag to avoid having all of my custom work undone.
Can “bulk locking” of a tag be achieved through scripting?
You can use multi-select in the web UI or a Plex Desktop app to do this. In any of the views (whichever makes sense for your use case) select multiple items.
For tracks, select items using the empty circle in the far-left column when you hover over a track. For artists or albums, select the empty circle in the top-left of the poster when you hover over an item.
Once the items are selected, click the edit (pencil) icon at the top of the list. In the tags tab you can then click the lock next to the field(s) you want to lock.
(You can also use shift-click to select multiple items in a contiguous list at the same time.)
But to answer your question, yes, this could be scripted as well. I’ll see if I can find an example for you (at least for something similar). I’m pretty sure there’s a Python script on these forums showing how to lock movie posters in bulk.
I strongly urge you to not waste your energy editing the Plex database.
Instead, add those genre tags to your music files. Then instruct Plex to use them as the genre source.
That way, all the work is preserved if you move the music, set up a new server, recover from a damaged database, or use a wholly different product.
Misappropriating a tag can easily backfire in the future. Some Kometa users are feeling it currently.
@OttoKerner , sorry maybe I wasn’t clear, but yes, I am making the changes in my music files.
I just don’t want Plex to overwrite those changes every time I do a metadata refresh.
I agree that “co-opting” a standard id3 tag is less than optimal. Unfortunately, Plex smart playlists only allow you to reference certain tags. It appears that it’s not (currently) possible to use extended or custom tags to create smart playlists.
