Hi,
is anybody working on the last fm music agent or interested in bug reports. It seems that all postings re that topic are constantly referring to a “future release” with a well known unspecified release date.
Sorry to sound a bit harsh but it is really getting on my nerves to find my music collection with partial albums from an unknown artist suddenty assigned to a well known other artist and the same record of another artist showing up under 3 differently spelled names each containing a fraction of the tracks.
All my files have perfect tags. Why in heavens name when the agent cannot find anything on last.fm does it sort the files to the “unknown artist/album” ?
Each time according to logs when there is a problem with the parsing of the result obtained i can query lastfm using the logged query and receive perfect results which are not used. Same goes for “unknown artists”.
Close to 95% the Custom Search does not find an artist/album although i can perfectly find it on last.fm. same here for the logged query. when i copy the url to the browser the result is perfeclty o.k with the searched name as the top result.
Is the last.fm agent supposed to contribute meta-data or to ignore all tags which are already perfectly o.k in the files. Is there any option to keep the information contained in the files and only fill fields / retrieve artists information / posters/album art or descriptions which are not given w/o voiding any information of the files tags?
Help and fixes really appreciated on that matter!
cheers
Udo
Forget this. Problem found. This is not a PLEX issue. Sorry Udo
What was the issue?
I don’t know how you managed to solve it but my music scanners are pretty much working very differently than movies ones - locally available info are being ignored if last fm is used.
I would expect albums, songs and genre tags NOT to be overwritten if last fm is used as secondary agent.
i stopped using PMS fr music because of this and multi-cd albums
Last FM tags are faulty or even wrong and misspelled
Hi,
the problem had 2 very different reasons:
[list][*]iTunes: i have itunes managing my music folder. I'm not using the itunes plex plugin but setting my plex music folder to the itunes music folder. i was under the impression that the itunes Information window does actually display the tags from the files selected. I dont what itunes does but for a some of my files the actual tags in the files had not been what itunes displayed despite me re-setting the fields in itunes over and over. I ve used easytags to fix all "unknown artist/unknown album" entries i've encountered and did another deep scan.[*]I'm a long time plex user. My Music DB has iterated over multiple server versions (and multiple agents including last.fm and custom ones.). I assume that i've had some old metadata from a previous agent attached. once the tags had definitly been clean i've removed and readded my complete library clearing trashes and bundles and optimizing the library. [/list]
Besides some unwanted merging of albums at least i no longer have the "unknown artist" entry.
The interface to work on music (change artist/album, match, merge and split albums) still leaves lots of things open IMHO.
cheers
Udo
I don’t know if this will help anyone, the end result might not be to your liking. But rather than using the Lastfm scanner/agents I just use the personal media scanner and it seems to pick up all my ID3 tags correctly (granted I’m not as particular about it as some). It also will not populate the general artist info besides the name. but indivdual albums seem to be correct, genres and all
Yes, you are right.
Drawback is that you won't have fanart and artist thumbs. So in a perfect world, personal agent would do it's job and last fm would then fill the missing tags and finally add thumbs and fanart.
Music tagging is easily the worst feature of Plex. Truly awful. It makes managing a large music library a serious nuisance.
Not only is it the worst feature, it's also completely broken. It's STILL being shipped with one of the primary agents broken, and hasnt been fixed for over 6 months now. The API is currently broken, so custom searches on albums, also dont work and so on... So yea, it's by far, the worst feature... It's no wonder so few actually use it for music. All of my friends that I've asked if they do, it's the same answer "naa, it's not working right for me" or "cant get it to work properly" similar...
Ok, yesterday i got hit by another problem of the music matching and sorting.
i’m a itunes match user and one of my albums was not fully matched but had 3 songs as mp3 and the rest as m4a. All Tags set (except track number of course) were set identical on both the m4a and mp3 files. nevertheless plex did not sort them to the same album (despite me manually matching and choosing the same album).
The mp3 files where one part of the album, the m4a files another part.
using my tageditor to check the mp3 vs. the m4a tags i saw that m4a does have 4 fields (orig artist,…) less than the mp3 files. After i’ve converted the mp3 to m4a using itunes plex suddenly matched the files to the same (and correct) album.
Is it possible that plex treats fields which are not there to be different from fields which are there but not filled in the tag-infos? If so would someone with the neccessary knowledge be able to change that, since for me when it comes to tags there is no difference if a tag is there and empty and if its not there.
thx udo
It's not exactly that it treats them as diffrent fields. But for one thing, "orig artist" is not a field type that exists in mp3. There is contributing artist, and album artist. Some id3 tag editors, wrongly name the album artist, as original artist however so if that's what you mean, then the problem is simple enough. Plex namely uses that album artist for its sorting and matching, which means that indeed the album Album 1, by the artist Unknown, is a diffrent album than Album 1, by Artist 1. Manually matching, does not actually help in this case, because to Plex, they still have diffrent ID3 tags, and thus are diffrent albums, they just happen to be named exactly the same and after matching, have the same artist... This is one of the many problems that the music section have. Matching... The other way around is sadly also common, and highly annoying... Two albums, both DO have diffrent metadata... But they get matched to the same album, and Plex merges them, despite them having diffrent tags. To put it simply, the matching function for music in plex... Is simply crap right now...
Hello Folks,
I'm a newbie to Plex, having a nightmare with Unknown Artists/Unknown Album.
Around 477 of my tracks for various Artists and albums aren't recognised by Last.fm. Is there an easy way to sort? I'm pointing a Music Section to my iTunes folder, most of my library has been picked up, however, this is driving me crazy!!
Seem to be missing everything (artist, album, track name) although everything seems to be there in the M4a tag, it's even not recognising Artists that it already has!!! (i.e finds an Artist/album, but won't find a second album for the same Artist!!)
Any help would be great, based on an average of 10 Tracks per album, I'm needing to sort over 40 albums!!!
Cheers
The Last.fm agent is annoying me too now. I really don’t understand why it just doesn’t allow you to view more results on the custom search??
For example I am searching for “Me First and the Gimme Gimmes.” When I search this on the Last.fm website it comes up as the first hit no problems.
When Plex uses the metadata agent to search, the first result is always “me first & the gimme gimmes” which returns no proper data. There is also no way for me to fix this with a custom search as it only shows 8 results all of which are incorrect. My local metadata is perfect and the ampersand sign doesn’t feature anywhere in my id3 tags or file names so I have no idea why it’s only showing results with an ampersand!!
I tried to install the custom Musicbrainz agent, it find the correct match but doesn’t return any images or biographies, etc.
How can I fix this?
Hi drzoidberg33,
A fix was pushed this morning that should fix the Me First and the Gimme Gimme's matching issue. Sorry about that, I missed this thread because it was older, and another one pointed out a similar issue yesterday which I fixed.
To the OP and earlier folks, are you still seeing the same issues today?
Also: don't tell me about the custom search for albums not working. I know about that one and it's been reported.
;)
One problem i have:
If you have an album wich has 2 cds, it will see each cd as a new album? Normaly you would click the album and see the two cds so what i want is
album a... click that and see the tracks in that album like:
track1 (cd1)
;
;
track12
track1 (cd2)
;
;
track12
just like itunes does!
Not sure if this will apply to anyone else, but a few artists would show up as "No match found" when they clearly existed on Last.fm ; to fix this issue, all you have to do is do a custom search, then delete the last character from the name of the band. Search, and the artist should now show up. Hope this helps.
@superhawk610: it's by design that custom searches will give better results, so I'm not surprised by that, but are you sure you need to alter the name? what if you run the search with the artist exactly as-is?
