Is there a way to improve music metadata support ?

Dev Community Dev/API Corner
1

Hi,

 

I've been using Plex for a little while now. It works fine with my movie and series collections. XBMC NFOs metadata agent even synces Plex' metadata with my XBMC library, and that's really great. Now I'd like Plex to handle my music collection, and I'm facing really big problems.

 

As a classical music fan, I have an extensive collection of lossless files with very precise and important metadata embedded within. I only use FLAC files, so metadata are stored in Vorbis comments. I'm using MusicBee as a collection manager because it's both fast and reliable, specially regarding metadata management. As of now, I own several tens of thousands of music files embedding valid metadata.

 

Now here is the problem I'm facing: when I add my music collection to Plex, the music scanner indexes the files correctly. Then, the default metadata agent begins to fetch metadata from my files to feed the database.My problem is that the default agent only seems to fetch a very small subset of the metadata contained in my files. I didn't expect Plex to understand very specific music tags like "conductor" or "instrument", but I thought it would at least handle the "genre" and "artist" tags. It does not.

 

I would really love to use Plex to listen to music. Since I'm a sys admin with dev skills (mainly C# / PHP / Perl), I thought maybe I could extend the default metadata agent to enhance the way Plex manages classical music ; but first I need some info:

  1. Adding support for the "genre" and "artist" tags is not very difficult, since these fields are already included in Plex database schema. This data may be gathered directly by the music scanner plugin ; there's no need of an agent to do that. Couldn't this be implemented by the Plex dev team instead of forking the default scanner ?
  2. Is there a way to extend Plex metadata model and include additional metadata fields for audio files ? For example, is there a clean way to add a "composer" metadata field for music files, and store it in the database ?
  3. Is there a way to add filtering controls to Plex/Web UI ? By default, audio files may only be filtered by genre or collection ; is there a clean way to register additional controls to filter the list by "album artist" or by "year" ?

Thank you for your support!

2

Common tags (such as genre and artist) should already work with FLAC files.  If they're not, it sounds like a bug to me.  Can you provide an example file or album that is not being read as expected?

Unfortunately, there's no way in the plug-in framework to add arbitrary metadata or filters.  Those need to be supported and understood by the Media Server itself.

3

Hi,

Thanks for answering me.

Here is a sample file: http://www.sendspace.com/file/es2tx2 The rar archive contains a flac file and a text file: I extracted the tags from the music file with metaflac.

Plex successfully retrieved the "title" and "album artist" tags, but not the "artist" and "genre" tags. Below are the XML data returned by Plex for the same file:

For this track, we should at least have:

  • One "album artist" record: "Scottish National Orchestra". That's OK.
  • Two "artist" records: "Scottish National Orchestra" and "Dame Janet Baker". The first artist may be merged with the "album artist" since they are identical. However, there is no entry for "Dame Janet Baker" in my library.
  • Two "genre" records: "~Romantique" and "#Lied" (special chars are not the issue here since normal genre names (without special chars) aren't extracted either)

@edit

One more strange thing: when I try to edit the track metadata, I can't find any "genre" or "album artist" field. Is it normal ?

Capture.jpg

Thank you again!

Marin

4

Apologies for dredging up an old post, but I have the same issue.

Every other program I have recognises the Genre and Year tags in my flac files except for Plex. As others have suggested in separate posts I have tried setting Local Media Assets as the priority agent, tried using Album View, but to no avail. Year and Genre do appear as options when clicking on filter, it's just the actually Years and Genres are not there.

I'm using the latest server (Win).

5

Hi,

I am facing the same issue. Neither is embedded album artwork showing up nor genres.

Multi genre would also be a great addon

Regards

6

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