Sorry if this doesn’t belong here, but this is a general Plex issue and not sure which forum to use.
If you’re a collector of live music SBDs both bootleg and semi official (think nugs.net or Bandcamp) and try to utilize the Artist or Style radios these tracks are just ignored entirely. I was curious and removed the official albums by a band I have numerous bootlegs of, String Cheese Incident, and when I try to start a radio they don’t even come up at all. Is there a reason Plex ignores albums that populate the same artist but aren’t an “official” release. If it’s building the radios off of allmusic or lastfm there’s going to be many albums missed imo since not everything musically gets listed on those services.
Okay so my question then is, why are the songs that I have on my library that are properly tagged with all the correct metadata etc not showing up on my radios. Like I mentioned in my OP, I have numerous concerts from bands, for example String Cheese Incident, and if I remove all of the studio albums and leave just the bootlegs none of the bootlegs will ever show up on a radio if I start a radio with that artist.
I think perhaps what you’re seeing is that bootleg albums aren’t likely to have popularity ratings from Last.FM, and this can negatively bias against them in radios.
In terms of style radios, do those albums actually have a style?
Do I have to go in and individually tag every album from every bootleg with the style considering every artist is already tagged with the style that it should be? That feels redundant.
Additionally I feel like Plex should be able to figure out that a track tagged with the same artist and track title is the same song regardless of what album it’s on live or studio.
I just want to point out that many of these bands are constantly releasing music all the time due to heavy tour schedules and for the most part they aren’t all cataloged on musicbrainz. Bands like Phish, Umphrey’s McGee and such can tour heavily every year and can release new shows all the time, especially since they have a different setlist every night, and the vast majority of which do not get cataloged on musicbrainz. I know this might be a niche feature, but for people like me who collect many live albums of various bands I enjoy, the task would be very daunting to go and add the hundred+ concerts in my personal collection to the musicbrainz database.
I went ahead and solved my problem by just creating a collection of artists and hitting shuffle. Additionally I’ll go and tag my albums with the style and see if that helps. Also I’ll be sure to keep on top of adding the tag to new albums to my server and just tag the style when I can since it doesn’t carry down from the artist tag down.
Maybe cosider adding that as a option down the line.
I don’t think you understand the size of the task you are describing. Anytime a small niche band releases a Soundboard recording through their bandcamp I need to log every single instance on another website for the dozens of concerts I download every year. I understand the power of collaboration, but to flip your response the code of one person adding an option to apply a tag to all albums can prevent someone from having to consciously go out of their way to feed an extra database constantly.
Just to clarify, it’s not like you personally have to do all this work. It just takes a single person to add a release to benefit everyone with the album.
@krazygamerhead I have only a handful of live album bootlegs from DMB. It is alot of work. Just a word of caution for you as I have learned over the last two years. If you are adding tags and things to Plex, be sure to backup your Plex files. Otherwise you will have to reload it all again manually.
To help. I recommend before you put the files in Plex you run them through MusicBrainz Picard. Picard is a application that tags your files and lets you upload the files to musicbrainz as a new release. If the release already exists you can scan for it in the database. It is kind of two birds one stone here. The program also lets you write a script that will name the files the way Plex wants to see them and move them to the correct folder. it takes a little bit to learn the program but once you do it really does help move things along and you can add one album at a time as you add them to Plex.
I have been using this method for about two years now and have grown to rely on it. And its really cool seeing albums that you add to the database show up in Plexamp. Sometimes instantly most of the time in 1 to 2 days. If you want any pointers or help with Picard just shoot me a message.
Thank you for that. I actually just remembered that that it existed and was tinkering with it when I saw your message. I plan on doing the same as you!
