MP3 music metadata chaos

Server Version#: 4.87.2

I have a chaotic Christmas music collection held in a load of folders on my server, which I set as a separate Source so I can only use it each December.

Today I finally decided I should sort out the metadata on my Christmas music so I used MusicBrainz Picard and a lot of manual tweaking to get everything just perfect in the ID3 tags in the files themselves.

Plex, however, has required almost as much manual adjustment again!

I chose “Prefer local metadata”, but I am finding that Plex simply ignores vast swathes of the data I have set up in the files. The problem seems particularly acute on the tracks whose MP3s are folders containing dozens of unrelated tracks - which is quite a typical way of storing Christmas music since it tends to be one or two tracks by each artist rather than whole albums of the stuff.

I have seen the guidance on the help pages about structuring the music in folders by artist and album, and this is how I tend to structure most of my music anyway - but in this case, it isn’t. Either way, I really don’t understand why Plex would ignore all my perfect metadata in the ID3 tags and start making up its own combinations of artists and albums.

For example, dozens of tracks in one folder were set to be on an album with an album artist which was the artist on just one track in that folder, and an album title which was the album title of one other track in there, even though all the individual tracks had their own album and artist metadata.

Most frustratingly of all, when I manually changed those fabricated albums to be things like “Christmas Music” by “Various Artists”, the individual tracks’ “Artist” field remained unpopulated by Plex, even though each track had its own artist set up in the metadata. This meant each track was being credited as by “Various Artists”.

Weirdly this wasn’t the case with every track in the affected folders - only about half the tracks in each folder were afflicted by this problem, while others respected and displayed the entered metadata regardless. Very strange and inconsistent behaviour!

I have had to go through hundreds of tracks in the media library manually entering the same information I already entered into the ID3 tags, just so Plex will show the data properly.

Can anyone advise on whether there is a way to force Plex to respect the entered metadata? Surely this should be the default behaviour anyway, especially if “Prefer local metadata” is ticked? Why does Plex allow its own chaotic assumptions about folders to override proper file metadata?

Thanks!

I’ve found Plex to be pretty consistent when tags are very accurate and complete, but unpredictable when they aren’t.

Could you show a screenshot showing the tags for some of these files? An app like MP3Tag that shows the tags in a spreadsheet-like format would be best, and showing at least the following tags:

  • Album Title
  • Album Artist
  • Track Title
  • (track) Artist
  • Track Number
  • Disc Number

With Plex configured to “Prefer local metadata,” the above tags must be populated. Empty tags will cause unpredictable results in Plex.

Since many of these are singles dumped in a folder, you may have to decide how you want them to appear in Plex. You could give them all an album title like “Christmas Singles,” and populate “Album Artist” with “Various Artists.” Plex will display them in that way, as an album under the artist “Various Artists.”

Or you could populate “Album Artist” to match “(track) Artist,” and give them Album titles like “Christmas Singles.” Then Plex should show each artist containing an album entitled “Christmas Singles.” You could also make each track’s Album Title the same as the track title. Plex would then show each artist with each of their tracks in its own Album.

In any case, if Plex manages to find a match for these releases, it may still appear that Plex has ignored your tags. In this case, “unmatching” the album should fix that.

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