My quest to get Plex to work for me continues, unfortunately not always with a great amount of success.
For example, I ripped a CD using dBpoweramp with the simple Artist/Album/Track naming format. I then used Musicbrainz Picard to change some of the embedded metadata as the artist’s name was not consistent throughout. I have set Plex preferences to Local Media Assets (both Albums and Artists) as the first source for metadata.
Plex still identifies a number of different artist names for the CD and, as a result, displays them as different albums. I don’t know what is going on. It seems, to me, that either I have not successfully changed the metadata or Plex is ignoring my request to use Local Media Assets as the prime source of metadata.
If your music library is of the type ‘Premium Music’ you must make sure to enable the checkbox “use embedded metadata” in the properties of your music library.
(Track)Artist
and AlbumArtist
are different metadata fields.
AlbumArtist must be uniform across all tracks that make out an album, whereas (Track)Artist must be not.
@nicholson2002 said:
I still have six albums for the one CD showing in Plex all with different artist names.
I am not sure what you mean by that.
Could you illustrate with screenshots maybe?
A look at your file names and their folder organisation can’t hurt as well.
My Finder folder is exactly as I would expect it to be. Musicbrainz shows the Artist and Album Artist as the same, ie Nicola Benedetti and is the same for all tracks on the CD but Plex insists on showing six different albums each with a different artist name (typically Nicola Bendetti and someone else who may have joined her for the particular track but I want just shown as Nicola Benedetti). This is a very small sample of my CDs that I want to rip and set up on Plex. I’m looking to sort out the basics before I start ripping CDs seriously. I clearly have no idea what I am doing!
Otto, I have just re-ripped the CD in FLAC format and Plex has shown it correctly!! I am truly astonished (and somewhat disappointed) that the problem seems to be that it doesn’t like the AIFF format but, if that is the case, it is better to find it out now before I start ripping all my CD collection.
@nicholson2002 said:
(3) I’m not sure what you mean? I show First name/Last name for the Artist and Last name/First name for the Artist Sort. Is that a problem?
I mean the folder name, where the album folders are stored.
I advise you to use the proper artist name for the folder as well.
That way Plex can “fall back” when embedded meta data are not available or are not working for some reason.
(Which was probably the case with your aiff files. Plex could not read the embedded meta data and so it tried to make sense of your file and folder names. see https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200265296-Adding-Music-Media-From-Folders )
May I just ask you to confirm that you are suggesting that I name my folder as First name/Last name notwithstanding that I will be using Last name/First name for the Artist Sort?
@nicholson2002 said:
May I just ask you to confirm that you are suggesting that I name my folder as First name/Last name notwithstanding that I will be using Last name/First name for the Artist Sort?
Yes.
Artist sort is a different matter.
The folder name should follow the precise name of the artist, just like he/she appears on e.g. record covers and other “public” information resources.
