For some reason the media scanner has gone insane. It is not just not getting the metadata, it also miscategorizes pieces with the metadata from other pieces:
All these have artists info, I added it personally to the files. Many of these are opus format, some are mp3. The years are also not displayed, the album artist also not correct (not various artists, these have clear album names) The Album Double Fantasy is just for one song, not for most of them, treasure planet is just for the last piece (the launch), all other albums are not read correctly.
What is going on there? Are there logs that I can send you to see where it is screwing up?
Is there a way to erase the metadata db without destroying all my playlists?
How are your files organized on the storage drive? This sounds like what happens when all the files are in a flat folder, which Plex will not do well with.
Why, I don’t know. It’s just the way it is. If it isn’t depending on embedded metadata, Plex uses the folder structure and filenames to identify the tracks/albums/artists. That much makes sense. But even when Plex is configured to prefer embedded tags, it still depends on the structure. You can find a number of threads in these forums about this.
So does this mean that I have to create an insane deep directory structure for every piece of music, creating 3 additional directories for each file? But that defeats the whole point of having these files in just one folder. And the folder function of Plex is completely 100% useless then.
So Plex Mediaserver can’t do what VLC and any other music player since 30 years has been easily been able to? Just add 30 tracks, play them one after the other and read the metadata from the files??? how hard is that? What is the browse by folder function good for anymore if you have to climb down and up 3 directories for every piece of music?
Insane!
Now that you mention it: I remember which update destroyed my whole music collection, all the playlists that I have got screwed up and most of the artists and even song names are completely wrong.
@Plex: Did you guys ever hear of Kaizen of the Toyota Production System?
It means that you IMPROVE things, not make them worse. The folder function in music used to work properly, now it is broken.
Sorry, as you can tell I’m pretty upset about this, being a paying customer and getting less and less in every release of plex it seems to me.
The Plex forum is a continuous revolving door of new users getting surprised/annoyed/angry with this, but the answer is always the same: change the folder structure.
Nope, I would recommend not using Plex at all for music (that is how I will solve the problem), it is defective for that. No wonder because it is more of a video player. Ignoring metatags, which all music today depends on is just pathetic.
Fixing the media scanner so it can just read the metadata and properly use that is not hard to do.
Creating additional directories for nothing and making this very convoluted is just a joke.
After having my playlists nuked by plex several times when reinstalling or losing the config, I started to create folder with my favorite songs, that I then can just add as a playlist, works really well. Well, until that “upgrade” of plex made meta data and the “play by folder folder” function useless.
If I were to use the “recommended” way of fixing, every song in my directory would create an additional 2 directories, with the single song just sitting in it, pretty insane. Also, I would have to undo this again, if I chose to use a normal music player that can actually just “read the metadata, play each song in a directory one after the other”.
At this point, my faith in Plex is a little shaken and I’m sceptical. I won’t spend more time building on trying to fix such a basic defect.
I suggest you move on to Navidrome, that’s what I have done (I’m running both actually), it has none of these issues.
It doesn’t have a client as good as PlexAmp unfortunately, and no Musicbrainz/Allmusic/Last.fm album reviews, artist bios etc, but the basics are done right.
