If you have “Plex Music” selected, the top 2 screenshots are of no concern. They do have the correct configuration for the legacy agents, though.
You don’t want to enable “Store track progress”. That doesn’t make sense for music, but only for audio books.
Why is Genre yet to “None”? This should be “embedded metatags”.
Please show the contents of the meta tags of one of the example albums.
There should be available a version of mp3tag for Mac. If you have other software which can show/edit the important tags, use that.
In any case, the content of the all-important Albumartist needs to be visible.
I’m not quite sure what you mean about the file browser thing but I assume it’s because I want to switch off the interactivity, recommendations, suggestions etc. & just have it as my music, my way.
If that’s the case, you’re quite correct. Roon does the same thing & it’s a pain in the butt.
I know my record collection. I don’t need someone else telling me about an album I own or telling who plays on it. I already know most of that &, where I don’t I always include a Discogs number so that I can go & find out.
Where I can switch these things off, I will. Where I can’t I can’t.
The fact of the matter is that, as with Roon, it just ends up with a clutter of mis & dis information & things not being right (because your internet sources are never 100% correct).
That said, I accept that it’s there & as long as my metadata is used, I’ll live.
That’s what I’d like to achieve in Plex but I’m not sure it’s possible.
Plex is using my tags some of the time. Nowhere near as much as it was before I deleted & rebuilt my library, sadly. Back then it was mostly only yje classical & Jazz that was suffering.
Here, half way through the Genesis library it gives up:
Mac’s rip CDs to AIFF by default, but I can always convert to FLAC if it’s better for Plex. It’s quite a lot of work but it’ll be worth it if it works.
Further to the above, I made a new library, PLEX_TEST, added a couple of albums, converted them to FLAC & tagged them correctly. I tweaked a couple of the settings in the advanced pane & they immediately switched to being displayed correctly.
By the way, I do appreciate that I can have unique album art in each release in Plex but
a) Until I can get it to look at my metadata, it pulls its own from the web, including the sleeve art and, as with the Lamb versions show before, it doesn’t make a distinction between versions.
b) It forces the sleeve art into the square & chops off any excess, which ruins the sleeve art.
Both things I can live with, obviously, I just get a certain joy from having my library match my physical collection as closely as possible.
Put a square jpg into the album folder, named cover.jpg.
(It can be of a much higher resolution than what you’d reasonably embed into an audio file, too.)
Yeah, I want the album covers to look like the real thing & many of them are not square.
I would have to open up every file & add extra on it to make the rectangular image sit within a square, which would mess up the way it displays in Roon.
It’s not a deal-breaker though. I can live with truncated sleeve art.
My main aim, at this point, is to get my library filing in the correct order so I can scroll & find stuff in Plexamp. I doubt I’ll be looking at sleeve art while I’m driving. lol
If I move over to Plex completely at some point, it might be the next big project.
On which note…
I’ve been adding files to the PLEX_TEST library I created & they’re coming in beautifully.
My process has been to copy the album(s) out of the CHOONZ library into a “waiting room”. Convert any AIFFs to FLAC, check/amend the tags & then add to PLEX_TEST.
What’s odd is that one particular album (13th Floor Elevators) I didn’t have to change anything, but it dropped into the new library correctly but is displaying incorrectly in the previous library. When I delete it from the previous library & then copy it back in from the test library, it starts displaying correctly, even though it’s not been changed.
For the PLEX_TEST library, I created a new folder on my external hard drive & then copied files to it (via the “waiting room”, where I checked the tags).
So I’m effectively duplicating my main library into a second folder.
Since my music library is 11TB & I only have an 18TB drive, I obviously can’t have the whole library on there twice, but I can’t see a way to gradually import the next artist, then the next artist into the new library from the existing one, so that a single library item is only one place but in two libraries.
I’m basically thinking that I could gradually recreate the main library & check everything as I go, but without duplicating everything.
If there is file format conversion and re-tagging involved, I see no other solution than to remove the source file after successfully adding it to the new folder.
It’s cool. I can check the tags in the existing library, do any conversions there, too. Make sure that Roon’s happy & then use the “add folders” option that I just found in the library settings.
Fair enough. But I have discovered that by copying folders out of the main library & into the PLEX_TEST library & then back again, they start showing up correctly in CHOONZ, so maybe that will have to be the route.
