Server Version#: 1.12.2.4929 (FreeNAS plugin)
Player Version#: 3.65.1 (Windows 10, not the Store app)
Background:
All music is stored as MP3 files with all the important tags filled (artist, album artist, album, year, track title), though if the track came from single, the album field is empty.
The files also include embedded front cover art (the album or single cover), mostly in resolutions of between 500 and 1000px. I do not currently store any other art (e.g. there are no artist images embedded).
Artist names are stored in the MP3 tag as “John Smith”, “The Group” or “John”, as appropriate
File structure is Artist/Album/file.mp3 with artist names in “Smith, John”, “Group, The” or “John” format
Problems:
Plex hasn’t downloaded images for any of the artists. I have tried emptying trash, rescanning the library, refreshing metadata and changing the agent settings. For the Artists agent I currently have the Personal Media Artists tab enabled and ordered as PMA, then local media; in the LastFM tab I have local media, LastFM, Fanart.tv and Home Theater Backdrops enabled, in that order. I have changing the priorities in both screens but nothing changed.
Libraries are set to update automatically, run partial scans when changed, and update every 6 hours.
Album art is clearly not being pulled from the MP3 in many cases. When playing a track full screen, the art is clearly scaled up from a very small image, rather than using the 1000px image in the MP3
I’ve tried creating a small test library to see if it will find the images correctly when starting from scratch, but for some reason Plex won’t even admit that there is any data in the new library.
I would like Plex to take the metadata and album images from the MP3 files where possible, then use the internet sources to fill the missing data and artist images. Does anyone know what settings I should be using in which order to guarantee this? I don’t have the largest music collection, but even so I’d rather not have to manually add images for everything, either as a file in the album folder (if that’s even a reliable method, which I have my doubts about based on other threads here) or one at a time through the Plex interface.
most of my libraries pictures and names are completely wrong collected and completely mixed the collection i have season 1 got mixed with season 5 and 7 that are some serious problems while there in ordered parts on my hard drive
I do not know if Plex can pull the pictures from the tags.
In my experience, I keep the tags very simple.
Any notes, genre, picture, or other data is left as a blank space on my tags.
I remember that Plex did find most of the info. But some of it I added manually with the web interface.
I think the setting you have for both Library and Agents is fine.
I added some more music to my collection this week, one of which was from a group from which I didn’t already have any tracks. In the artists view, this group’s entry has a picture which Plex has obviously managed to find all on its own. It’s actually one picture from several that were found, so it’s clear that Plex is still able to make matches on its own. However, none of the other artists I’ve checked have any matched pictures at all, even those I’ve recently added more tracks to.
Seriously, why can’t Plex make any of these other matches? Why doesn’t it have a simple, reliable method by which I can force it to retrieve pictures and other metadata for existing media? Why can’t there just be a simple, clear (and retroactive) option somewhere that says “use the cover art from the MP3 file if it exists, otherwise try to find an image online” (and similarly for all the rest of the metadata that Plex will actually use)?
Failing all of that, can anyone offer us a reliable method of wiping Plex’s database/cache/whatever of whatever information it is currently mistakenly holding onto for artist images (without resetting anything else), which I hope would cause Plex to notice that the image were missing and then go search again?
Edit: I’ve had limited success in opening the artists’ pages, then using the menu to rerun the match function. This has, in some cases (and usually after a very long time) managed to find exactly one artist picture and no backgrounds at all. This isn’t much of an improvement as the match option is only available from within the artists’ page and therefore can’t be started in bulk. Additionally, even if I start up 10 or so in quick succession, it won’t seem to run more than three searches in parallel, each taking about a minute to come up with its very limited results.
