Plex supports only ID3 tags (preferably v2.3 in UTF-16)
as well as Vorbis comments.
No matroska tags, or broadcast wave tags.
Which type are you using/which file format are you using for your music?
I mostly use flac, but also have a lot of mp3s, in case something isn’t released in the flac format.
The usual tags (Track title, Artist, Album Artist, Album Title, Track Number, Disc Number) are read very well for all files. Before adding them to plex, I always check, and correct if needed, the tags with Mp3Tag.
Thanks for your answer, I now know there aren’t more tags I can play with to be read by Plex.
Is there any chance more tags can be implemented (optionally Plex-specific tags, like there are itunes-specific & MusicBrainz specific tags)?
I for instance fill in manually: different genres + styles, the release date (when known, including month & day), the label it was released on.
It would be nice if One could add all tags with an a program like Mp3Tag (using the more advanced mode where any tag can be created), so that the files can be read by Plex, without the need of adding extra tags in Plex itself.
Or, an option which allows Plex to add these tags to the files whenever they are entered.
Now it is time consuming to get everything right, and above that I need a rather complex backup procedure to be sure everything I enter will be maintained in case of a server crash, or when I update/replace my server (which in my case will soon be the case.)
Bear in mind that in Plex some tags like Date (DATE/TDRC in FLAC & id3v2 respectively) and Genre (GENRE/TCON) are treated as album-level only, i.e. unfortunately you cannot have songs with individual dates and/or genres, they’re all the same for all songs on an album.
Record Label (PUBLISHER/TPUB) is already supported by Plex, as is Release Type (RELEASETYPE/TXXX:MusicBrainz Album Type, for example: if you store the value “single” in that frame, the release will be sorted under the “Singles/EPs” category in Plex).
Plex unfortunately does not support the Release Date (RELEASEDATE/TDRL) tag, only the Date tag (DATE/TDRC). So for that, there won’t be a need for Plex-specific tags, it would just need to support the tags that are already there in the standard.
Other official tags like Language (LANGUAGE/TLAN), Disc Subtitle (SETSUBTITLE/TSST), Tempo (BPM/TBPM) and Mood (MOOD/TMOO) would all be great but are not yet implemented. Same with additional artist tags like Producer, Lyricist, Remixer, Conductor, Composer, etc. But the requests for those are 10+ years old, so presumably they’re not very high on the priorities list of the Plex devs.
Work (WORK/TIT1) and Movement (MOVEMENT/MVNM, the latter an Apple-introduced frame) for classical music are not supported either.
Ah, but the date tag is supported?
That’s already a nice thing to have.
I usually give in the initial (first) release date, as this is musically far more relevant than the release date of a specific version (which is more relevant to a collector)
For live performances, I use the date of the performance for the same reason, even if it was released years later. The main purpose is to sort releases by a certain artist in the right order, also when more releases came out in the same year.
The “Publisher” tag for label is useful, but maybe it’s a bit in conflict with the fact that publisher usually refers to the one owning the music publishing rights, rather than the one issuing the recorded performance. Should not pose problems in practice, as such info is far less relevant and can only work properly on track-level, not album-level.
My main interest is to have proper info on album-level.
Having this on track-level would be nice if this info would be included in file releases, but that’s rarely the case. If this kind of info is present, it’s mostly part of the (additional) artwork.
(The possibility to include extensive artwork which can be browsed on a TV is another chapter I would like to see happening, but that’s a different subject)
In Flac files, it is actually Label. Vorbis tags allow for free naming of tags. (But that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to happily expand them and re-invent the wheel for every player and library app out there.)
ID3 doesn’t know Label, so you’ll have to make do with TPUB.
Dates are a bit of a mess since a lot of applications interpret them differently, there’s:
ORIGINALDATE / TDOR (frame names in FLAC/Vorbis and id3v2.4 respectively), in principle defined as the release date of the original song/composition in the case of covers, live versions, remixes, classical compositions etc. But nowadays, many apps/auto-taggers ignore that definition, and use this field instead for the first/“original” release date of the album, not the song. Plex reads this field and uses it for sorting, you can see it when you do Edit → Originally Available.
RELEASEDATE / TDRL, should contain the (re)release date of the album, but many apps ignore it. One of the most popular taggers, MusicBrainz Picard, can’t even write it (!), although there’s a bugfix pending. I’ve been testing this a bit, and it seems like Plex can read this field, but will only use it if ORIGINALDATE is empty.
DATE / TDRC, in principle defined as the recording date of the individual song, but some apps put the (re)release date of the album there instead (which could be decades off, indeed). Plex reads this field but only uses it if ORIGINALDATE and RELEASEDATE are both empty. Many apps, like for example Apple Music, only support this date field, and none of the others.
In any case, Plex cannot handle individual dates for individual songs: in Plex an album has one release date, and all songs inherit that date, regardless of what they’re tagged with individually. This is different from other apps like Apple Music, Navidrome, foobar2000 etc which have no problem with song-specific dates.
using ORIGINALDATE in a flac tag, I get a weird result: 1969-12-31 instead of 2018-05-31
Also, I don’t seem to be able to read out the LABEL tag, here I tried to use both TPUB & LABEL, but no luck.
But… when using DATE, it does read out correctly, only Mp3Tag seems to automatically change it to YEAR instead. (See screenshot when I re-read the data after entering the full date with the DATE tag, now visible as YEAR tag, but read out correctly)
I have not checked “Prefer local metadata”
Might this make a difference??
I want to check this, but I’m not sure if any metadata I added manually will be overruled/removed if I do so and rescan the library… I don’t want that.
(An option or command to write Plex tags in file metadata would come handy, after all, the best place to store tags is in the actual files, rather than in a separated location)
It will only overwrite fields which are not “locked”.
Plex will never touch your media files.
You need to edit this in the preferences of MP3tag. The whole left side panel can be customized. You simply need to put the actual DATE input field there, instead of YEAR.
Thanks, the DATE tag was mapped to the YEAR tag in the preferences, so just removed that.
Will fields I have filled in using Plex, but which contain no info in the tags, be kept, if I tag “Prefer local metadata”? Or will those be emptied too? (in case they are not locked)
Maybe I should just experiment with an alternative library to be on the safe side?
