My problem is that Plex sort of uses the meta data. It seems like it tries to make guesses based on phonics while ignoring the actual data. For example, “Bach” becomes “Box Set.” Sometimes, it uses French instead of English, even though my system is definitely an English system (but I’m wondering if that’s because I use a VPN that randomly uses Canadian IP addresses). When I use edit to try to enter the correct information, I get this message: “Your changes could not be saved.” Of course, there’s no way that I can figure out why it won’t save my changes. It seems kinda dumb to have an edit utility that cannot perform edits.
While I’m complaining… Plex also splits albums. By this I mean that the same album is listed more than once with some of the songs in each place. Plex just randomly creates multiple instances and there is no obvious order to the assignment of the songs (e.g., tracks 1, 4, 5, & 8 will be in one instance and tracks 2, 3, 6 & 7 will be in another instance). Sometimes, Plex just misses whole albums completely.
So, basically, I’m left with an inaccurate and very stupid looking presentation. I’m thinking I will need to print out the actual albums in a list that is cross-listed with the idiotic names Plex assigns.
I can assure you that the metadata is correct. I use mp3tag to set the metadata, so album title, album artist, etc. are the same for all of the songs.
It seems like Plex used to be better at looking up the information. It may be my imagination, but I’m thinking a recent tweak to the code really screwed up the music information algorithm.
I wrote this How-To some time back, and have recently made some edits to account for recent changes to the music scanning agent.
The recent changes made some great improvements (the “Plex Dance” is almost certainly no longer needed for Music libraries), but in some cases I’ve found it to be pickier than it used to be about the metadata, as well as folder/file names. It’s still dismally poor in managing Classical music, and requires some mismanagement of tags to get Plex to be reasonably useful in that case.
Thank you. I’ll look at it now. It’s not like I haven’t read the documentation. I have.
It’s just frustrating when Plex absolutely cannot find the information for a very popular album loaded from a CD that is sitting right in front of me. I have a very large music collection in Plex. For the most part, Plex has done well. This apparent phonic matching comes up with some ridiculous results, though. It’s as if the damnable autocorrect from my phone has migrated to Plex.
Well… Hush my mouth!!! Prefer local metadata! They sure buried that sucker deeply!
That reminds me of how I used Plex for several years before I discovered the “Use hardware encoding” option. I spent a lot of money on hardware upgrades that I didn’t need before I discovered that Plex doesn’t use available hardware by default. I eventually was able to be the smart kid on a forum when I passed along that information. Evidently, it’s common to overlook that one, probably because there’s a tendency to believe that the default settings will be the best settings.
Plex is still very temperamental. I’ve found it’s best to start with an empty library, because if there are subfolders, Plex will scan them before a person has the chance to go into advanced settings to prefer local data. It’s also rather hit or miss as to whether Plex will use the cover art embedded in the metadata. It has a peculiar preference to present Mannheim Steamroller’s Christmas albums as music from the Lord of the Rings, which is just bizarre. I have to edit the cover art from the file system into Plex.
So, for each library, I now have three folders. One is the actual library folder. Another is to hold the music folders as I review and move each into the Plex library folder. A third folder is the Plex dance folder to move music folder out of and back into Plex as I tediously struggle to the precise arrangement of bits and bytes to satisfy Plex’s pernicious peculiarities.
You can edit the properties on the ‘Advanced’ tab during the course of creating the library, before the actual scan is commencing.
I recommend to place a version of the cover with good detail (~ 1200px) as cover.jpg inside the album folder. Embedded cover art is usually not that large (and should rather not be, to maintain maximum compatibility with all types of players).
I have found that you have to look up which ‘Album Artist’ is actually listed on musicbrainz.org for a particular album. For ‘soundtrack’ and compilation-type of albums this is not always as straight forward as one may think.
If you have found out the real Album Artist, you must make sure to place the album within its own ‘Artist Name’ folder on disk. i.e. if you mix in albums with different Album Artists into the same ‘Various Artists’ folder, the Album Artist data from one of the albums in there can overrride all the other album artists metadata for all other albums in there.
/Music
/ Various Artists
/ Sampler Album 1
1. Artist - Track Title.mp3
2. Artist - Track Title.mp3
...
/ Artist Name
/ Album Title
1. Artist - Track Title.mp3
2. Artist - Track Title.mp3
...
I don’t have a “Various Artists” folder. I don’t like seeing “Various Artists.” Plex shows “Various Artists” as the top level label if there are various artists on the album, conveniently ignoring the “Album Artist” in the metadata. Setting the album artist in the metadata used to work, but it doesn’t any more.
I have structured my file system just as the documentation specifies. It’s just odd how sometimes I’m told that the metadata is all important and other times I’m told the same about the file system structure. I have been tediously careful about both, but nevertheless with great frustration. With my holiday music library that I’m working on now, I have had to delete the library several times and start over. So I’m getting plenty of practice. (Said with a sinisterly sarcastic sneer!)
I did, by the way, find something that causes Plex to split the song list into multiple instances of the same album: hyphens in the song title. It happened twice tonight. I also noticed that when it splits albums, it doesn’t list all of the songs. It only listed eight of sixteen songs across the three instances of the album that had the problem. Replacing the hyphens with commas and deleting the library and moving each artist/album combination into an empty library folder fixed the problem.
Okay. I’ll look for the advanced tab when I create libraries in the future. As for now, I’m well under way with this one.
Well… I do put a cover.jpg file in the album folder–and yes, I use a high-resolution image if I can find one so that it will display nicely on my 65-inch television.
I found another case in which Plex splits an album into multiple instances when a hyphen exists in the metadata. It was splitting “Trans-Siberian Orchestra” with the songs randomly divided between the two instances. Removal of the hyphen fixed the problem. The difference this time is that the hyphen was in the artist name instead of the song title.
The problem seems very random. I noticed that the album was split, so I used mp3tag to check the metadata. It looked fine, but I saved again anyway. I did the Plex dance and Plex split the album again, but this second time, it chose different songs and a different number of songs to split.
In case you’re wondering, I did switch to using the “Prefer local metadata” option, as was recommended.
