Music Import

[Samuel-Kleemeyer]

I’ve decided to digitise some of my old records and put them into Plex. The Plex library already contains a collection of my CD’s that work fine, but once I’ve cut the record into the individual tracks and import them, the album shows up as ‘Unknown Artist’ even through the directory is set out just like all the others (Artist -> Album -> Songs). Once I manually correct this and force the metadata to update, it shows most popular songs and information about the artist but fails to collect album/artist artworks. Is anyone able to enlighten me on how to resolve this issue, it was not a problem beforehand but doesn’t seem to be working properly now?
Cheers.

[OttoKerner]

My generel advice is to not use ‘Fix Match’ if you can avoid it.
Put all the grunt work into getting the embedded metadata and the folder organisation and the file naming right.

Verify that the software you are working with is embedding sensible metadata into your files.
Or, even worse, that it does not blab about itself in the meta tags (‘ripped with xxx’)

If your records are kinda non-common or if you are a serious collector who has not only albums but also singles and EPs, you might want to tell Plex to give your embedded meta tags preference over what it can obtain from online databases.

One important thing is: if you have made some corrections to metadata or file names, in order for Plex to correctly sort your music, you will have to perform the Plex Dance if the files in question have been added into Plex before the corrections were made.

Look up the spelling of artist and album names before adding them into your library. This will help greatly to get proper metadata.
If you value high-quality cover art, I recommend you to obtain them as separate file in jpg or png format and add them as folder.jpg into the folder of the associated album.
It allows you to have rather large-ish cover file sizes without blowing the file size of the music files out of proportion.

Here are some more tips regarding music

multi-disc albums

Organizing Music - Soundtracks and Various Artists (Hit collections)

I am going to do a bit of copy/paste of posts I did in the Plex Pass only forums: ===== 1.“Various Artists” is the usual choice for ‘Sampler’ style albums. There may be exceptions for ‘collaboration’ albums which are credited to all participating artists on the album cover. 2. use the title of the single as it appears on the cover. You can augment that information with (CDM) or (single) or (Maxi) or (EP) as it fits. If it is a genuine release, Gracenote should have no problem identifying it. …

handling singles and EP’s

Best way to add album, singles & ep to a Premium Music Library

conventional CD release If we are talking about a conventional CD single release (where there is still more than one song contained), the tagging is not different from an album. AlbumArtist: “Depeche Mode” Album: “Blasphemous Rumours (CDS CDBONG7)” Artist: “Depeche Mode” DiscNo: “1” Of course you don’t need to include the full catalog number like I did in the example. It is just there to show you that it is possible. But you might still wanna include (CDS) into the album title, just to ind…

possible ‘side car’ files for music

Music Album artwork

Little tip: If you have lots of bootlegs etc. you want to bring your embedded metatags into order first. Then you need to have the Local Media Assets agent in top position. I wouldn’t trust last.fm to fetch correct info about bootlegs and special editions of albums, like those recent expanded re-releases of Zappa albums. Put as much info into the meta tags as possible. Put a cover art inside the album folder and you should be good. Makes sure to set at least ‘AlbumArtist’ and ‘AlbumTitle’ to…

soundtracks and ‘various artists’

Plex Folder View - folder.jpg not recognized?

@naddel81 said: album view does not work properly, because if you have various artists on an album (most cases) then it shows them as “various artists” instead of the album name. folder view would be the best option and I guess it has been asked before. is it too hard to implement? You can put what you like into the AlbumArtist meta tag, if you don’t like it to appear under VA. You could use the game title or the game developer or the game ‘universe’ (if you have several albums which fit in…

[Samuel-Kleemeyer]

Ok I’ll try it. What software would you recommend I use to add metadata? I’ve tried a couple but they’ve either straight not worked or not import enough information for Plex to be able to take advantage of it.

[OttoKerner]

@Samuel-Kleemeyer

they’ve either straight not worked or not import enough information for Plex to be able to take advantage of it.

It may have to do with what I said above, regarding the Plex Dance.

Also, Plex doesn’t read all meta data. Only the most common ones. And there are some file formats from which Plex cannot read meta data at all.
So please provide some details about:

• which file format
• which meta data were you having difficulty with
• what is your operating system? Availability of software differs between Windows, MacOS and Linux quite drastically.

[Samuel-Kleemeyer]

I have attemped the Plex Dance and I get the same result. The music I’m adding is .wav and the server is running on a Windows 7 64bit machine. I tried adding basic data such as Artist, Track, Year to the metadata but still not importing correctly, does it matter if the tracks aren’t the exact same length as in the album? If so I may need to cut them up again at the exact correct lengths.

[FordGuy61]

@Samuel-Kleemeyer

What software would you recommend I use to add metadata?

Take a look at dbpoweramp and PerfectTunes, https://www.dbpoweramp.com/.

They are commercial products.

I use dbpoweramp to rip/convert my CDs. It can rip to basically any format you want and verify the rips against AccurateRip to make sure they are correct. It adds metadata from multiple sources. It has a converter capability to convert between formats. For example, I rip to FLAC or ALAC and convert the lossless formats to AAC, MP3, etc lossy formats as needed.

I use PerfectTunes to modify metadata on a album and/or artist level. It will pull in album, song, art, etc info from multiple sources.

dBpoweramp also has an EditIDTag tool for modifying metadata on a per-song/per-album basis.

A buddy turned me on to dBpoweramp several years ago when I first started ripping my audio CDs. I’m sure there are shareware/freeware products that perform the same functions. However, dBpoweramp works great and IMHO, is worth the price.

Take a look at both. dBpoweramp (CD ripper & Audio converter) has a 21 day no limits trial. PerfectTunes also has a free trial, but with very limited functionality.

[dcpete816_gmail_com]

@FordGuy61

What software would you recommend I use to add metadata?

I’ve used J River for years and it is incredibly powerful for all tagging needs.

Chris

[OttoKerner]

Plex cannot read meta data from wav files. I strongly suggest you switch to the Flac format.

[Samuel-Kleemeyer]

Thank for the support. It works fine and correctly identifies the album with a different format, I didn’t realise that Plex was unable to read wav files.