Meta data in Plex vs the file

[xpusostomos]

I was always a bit slow coming to the Plex party, because I was never happy with the playlist management compared to iTunes. Well it’s improved a lot now I see. I recently lost my iTunes library to corruption (arrgh!), and moved away from the Apple ecosystem, so I’m now fully on board with Plex.

One thing that partially “saved” me from the iTunes library corruption is that iTunes puts its meta data INTO the files. So having lost my library, all was not totally lost, I can write scripts and so forth to recover some organisation to the total mess I was left with.

HOWEVER, Plex doesn’t, as far as I see, put meta data into the files. This worries me because if I ever lose my Plex library, or was forced to move to something else, all my metadata is stuck in Plex.

And it would be tedious beyond belief to go file by file and use a tag editor to tag my files outside of Plex, unless Plex could export… oh say, a list of all the movie files with a particular Genre, so I could update the tags.

And since Plex doesn’t officially support plugins anymore, I’m presuming there is no pathway there to do anything, even if I had the inclination to do so.

So my question, is there any way to “get at” the Plex meta data, to do anything along the lines that I want? Or do I just have to submit myself to Plex and hope it never fails?

And is there any way to recover my iTunes music ratings? I have an old iTunes library still intact, that I could recover most of my ratings from, but I don’t know how I would import it to Plex. There was a plugin at one point that claimed to be able to do it, but I could never get it working.

[tom80H]

I suppose there’s different approaches to answer your question.

First: While I certainly hope, Plex won’t fail me… there’s always the route to backup your database. In case your server goes south you’ll still be able to restore it from a backup – including all the metadata.

As for your specific question:

1. The metadata is inside your database and can be accessed as such (SQLite).
2. You can even use some of the API endpoints of the PMS to lookup metadata and details for the items in your library. There’s little / no official documentation for those though.
3. There’s 3rd party options such as Web Tools NG / Export Tools NG to manually trigger a more easily accessible dump of your metadata (and more)

[xpusostomos]

You can backup iTunes too, which I diligently did for 15 years… I think also sqllite I believe… until… something went wrong. The thing about media libraries is they are big and backup routines are not as thorough as they might otherwise be. But thanks for the pointer to web tools, I’ll check it out.