I recently reorganized my music library to a /Music/Artist/Album/Track file structure so that I could get “Prefer Local Metadata” to work without issue with the new metadata system introduced in 1.18.0 (was having some tracks come up with no track name/title). I prefer to use my own metadata because I know it is correct as I have been meticulously managing it for years. Anyhow, as I went through this process I noticed some odd issues, maybe bugs, that I thought I should bring to the attention of Plex because there’s definitely some issue with the new metadata system.
Artist names in Plex must be coming from MusicBrainz and not my tags (again, I have “Prefer Local Metadata” on) as I have them formatted one way (in plain text, no special characters) yet in Plex they are stylized different and contain special characters. While this is good I guess, it doesn’t seem right given the fact that I’ve told Plex to use MY metadata, not MusicBrainz’s.
Sometimes artwork doesn’t show up, despite being saved in the file. All my artwork is in .jpg format and is relatively high quality 600x600 - 1200x1200; usually somewhere in that range. Refreshing metadata in the album or artist sometimes works.
Plex is incorrectly matching albums that have similar names against MusicBrainz and then combining them into one. For example, I have two copies of Sublime’s self-titled “Sublime” album. One however is a Deluxe Edition that has different versions of some tracks. The two album names in the ID3 tags are “Sublime” and “Sublime (10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)” and Plex combined the two into one album, despite the different name and despite the different release years stored in there. This to me shouldn’t be happening if “Prefer Local Metadata” is turned on.
There are a couple more things to do to make sure local data is used first.
In Server Settings > Agents, arrange your metadata agents in the correct order. Make sure the ‘Local media assets’ agent is at the top of the list for Artists and Albums (I would do this for all subsections, Personal Media Albums, Plex Premium Music, and Last.fm):
For artwork, on the same page where the ‘Prefer local metadata’ setting is located, farther down is a setting for Album Art that looks like this:
Setting this to ‘Local Files Only’ will ensure that only your local artwork will be used. If it’s set to ‘Both…,’ the ‘Prefer local metadata’ setting defines which takes precedence. Plex will use local artwork if it’s found, and only look online if there’s nothing local.
I see an update to my How-To regarding this is in order. It’s a bit out of date.
Hmmm… is there actually a “Plex Premium Music” anymore? I don’t see it in the local web app, or the hosted. Also odd I don’t see an agent setting for the new “Plex Music” associated with MusicBrainz, but maybe it’s not official yet, or options are not an option
I don’t know or recall how that worked with the old music library system, but currently, using that setting appears to download album and artist artwork. I’m pretty sure it actually uses the local artwork, but the other images are downloaded and available for selection.
Plex usually respects the local metadata and embedded tags, but will ignore it occasionally for no apparent reason. Particularly on compilations albums, even with “Various Artists” as the album artist set on all tracks, and for sure on albums which are collaborations by two artists. In that case, it selects the first artist, and adds it to your library as a solo album by that artist.
Plex also seems to match to the “Release Group” at MusicBrainz, and not a specific “Release” within that group having different tracks, etc. That can cause duplicate albums with the same name.
Yeah, I copied that bit from the How-To, which needs updating, and I missed it.
At one point when I was testing, if ‘Local Files Only’ was selected and there was no local image, Plex would not set an image for the artist/album. Maybe it DL’ed the images, I don’t remember. I haven’t retried this recently.
Thank you sir. I used to have Local Media Assets at the top of each list, but they apparently changed somehow.; I changed them back. Weird!
For the album art, I already had “Both Plex Music and Local Files” selected as that will prefer local artwork then go online. That way it will fill in the gaps; I have some old stuff that I never got album art for, but probably 90% of my library has art already.
