Music Labeling Issue

General Discussions
1

I have been putting off labeling my music collection but finally got really started last weekend and I ran into a odd problem. I have many artist (like Bob Seger and Brian Eno) that have releases under alt names (like “Bob Seger” and “Bob Seger and the silver bullet band”) that I want to be in one artist folder. To get around this I have

  1. Set the “albumartist” to the artist I want it to be listed under
  2. Removed the folder from plex.
  3. Re-Scanned music
  4. Re-added folder
  5. Re-Scanned

This has and still works.

Problem lies in adding large amounts of artists at once. If I add a whole letter (say all of my artists starting with “B”) it places them in different folders. If I remove the single artists folder…scan…re-add…and then re-scan its back to being right again.

My server agents settings are set to “Local Media Assets” for all places they can be.

Anyone have any suggestions on what I might be doing wrong ?

2

I personally build in a ‘safety net’, for cases when the embedded metadata are not read properly (an issue on some NAS platforms) or are even absent (like with WAV or DTS files). If the embedded tags fail, the clue for Plex lies in the file names and folder structure.
For new additions to my library, I now always use the file naming and folder structure which is recommended for untagged files.
Since I started doing that, I have never had to fight against Plex misplacing my files.

If you are using Local Media Assets in the top position, you must be very carefully to have all the necessary metadata in your files, in the right way.

  • There is a difference between AlbumArtist and Artist. AlbumArtist must contain the same in all tracks belonging to one particular Album. The alternative artist names you mentioned are going into the normal Artist (TrackArtist) tag.
  • AlbumTitle must not contain a disc number or disc title (some albums have that). It must be exactly the same across all tracks of one album.
  • the TrackNumber and the DiscNumber metatags should be present in all tracks of an Album

more Detail:
see https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1093611/#Comment_1093611
and https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1050849/#Comment_1050849

3

Otto,

Thanks for the reply I agree a “safety net” is a good idea and I do that as well for many artists. I went through and fixed a few of these folders and found a few “oddities” I wanted to capture here for others dealing with naming issues.

  1. I find that the date needs to be at the end of the album line.
  2. If you have multi CD albums the numbering of the tracks WILL break naming. I confirmed this on Bob Seger “Live Bullet” and changing them to be always increasing (IE CD1 tracks 1-8 CD2 tracks 9-xxx) fixes things (it moved from the Artist name of “Bob Seger & and the silver bullet band” to “Bob Seger” just by fixing this one thing).
  3. The artist anywhere outside of the artist folder level breaks things (This was known …I was relying on tags to fix this…I know better now :slight_smile: )

This is not a fix for proper use of embedded data by Plex but its a decent way to work around it :slight_smile: I hope one day the Music naming agents are more robust and can work with inconsistencies better :slight_smile: Till then I need to get my awk foo and Picard rename line warmed up to do some house cleaning :slight_smile:

Oh and how I wish the use of

artist-poster.jpg
artist-background.jpg

worked consistently :frowning: Even a forced refresh doesnt seem to work on all artists I have.

4

@ChrisKnoxville said:

  1. I find that the date needs to be at the end of the album line.

Yes, just like with movies and tv shows in Plex.

  1. If you have multi CD albums the numbering of the tracks WILL break naming.

I don’t agree. I get all my albums to ‘behave’ and keep the per-disc track numbering. If you use the Disc x subfolders as shown in my links and set the proper ‘disc #’ meta tags in the files (and make sure they don’t contradict each other) you will have no trouble with track numbers.

  1. The artist anywhere outside of the artist folder level breaks things (This was known …I was relying on tags to fix this…I know better now :slight_smile: )

Could you elaborate on that a bit? I am not sure what you mean by it.

Oh and how I wish the use of
artist-poster.jpg
artist-background.jpg
worked consistently :frowning: Even a forced refresh doesnt seem to work on all artists I have.

This may be the same reason why some of your embedded metadata are not read by Plex. The Local Media Assets agent also takes care of ‘sidecar’ files like these.
It breaks down on some server platforms because of special characters in file and folder names.
Are you using some type of NAS?

5

Glad to clarify and thanks for the feedback!

3) The artist anywhere outside of the artist folder level breaks things (This was known …I was relying on tags to fix this…I know better now )

I have run into issues with
$ARTIST/$ARTIST - $ALBUM/$TRACK_NUMBER - $TRACK
and even
$ARTIST/$ALBUM/ $TRACK_NUMBER - $ARTIST - $TRACK

Having that $ARTIST in any place other than where it belongs creates issues for me. Your guide does show this so not disagreeing :slight_smile:

Are you using some type of NAS?

No I am running a CentOS 7 box. It works for some artists …sometimes I can not touch the system …and POOF the image starts showing up(I do run some of the built in maintenance scripts at night). I have some debug logs from a forced refresh …need to get time to peek at em.

2) If you have multi CD albums the numbering of the tracks WILL break naming.

I think my issue for me lies in the changes that have happened over the years. This issue for me in this case was related to the CD number tag being in the ID3 tag along with the correct track label but the Filesystem was not correct. I have seen it done several ways …and your way is likely right (didnt test but think I have used it in the past with success) I have used the method of ID3 tag for CD number and then increasing the track numbers without the CD number in the filename. I also have used the $DISK_NUMBER-$TRACK_NUMBER and both worked for me.

That statement was written late at night …and was too brief …sorry for the confusion :slight_smile: Its getting late again and I would rather be working on my re-label so I retract it :slight_smile: So folks finding this just use OttoKerner’s link :slight_smile:

Many of my tracks out date Plex by more than a decade some with IDv1 still in place. I am taking things folder by folder (A-Z) and cleaning up the cruft and reporting issues as I run into them. As a person who has to write regex almost daily I can respect the pain it can be when you have something the scale of Plex…just offering some feedback and am glad to help test things where and when I can.

6

@ChrisKnoxville said:
Are you using some type of NAS?
No I am running a CentOS 7 box. It works for some artists …sometimes I can not touch the system …and POOF the image starts showing up(I do run some of the built in maintenance scripts at night). I have some debug logs from a forced refresh …need to get time to peek at em.

So it’s Linux. Which is what most NASs use too. There is an issue which can besolved by using the right language/codepage environment vars.
Here is what solved the issue on QNAP https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/206148/unicode-error-with-filename-containing-german-umlauts
(I am not saying this will will solve it for you. It is just to better explain what I mean because I am not so comfortable around Linux. )
But first we need to confirm that it is this issue which affects you. Which can only be done by inspecting log files, namely the com.plexapp.agents.localmedia.log.

2) If you have multi CD albums the numbering of the tracks WILL break naming.
I also have used the $DISK_NUMBER-$TRACK_NUMBER and both worked for me.

I’ve found that, as long as you have proper metadata, it will work despite these.
But as soon as you don’t have metadata (due to a defect of the LMA agent or due to their absence), things will break down.

As a person who has to write regex almost daily I can respect the pain it can be when you have something the scale of Plex…just offering some feedback and am glad to help test things where and when I can.

Appreciated. :slight_smile:

7

Most NAS’s being Linux might be a stretch as many are BSD (or under the BSD license …which could run on most *nix OS’s). Not trying to argue just making sure the BSD folks get some love :slight_smile:

I read the link you posted and went to check what I have and got this (no changes from defaults from RPM install):

xargs --null --max-args=1 < /proc/$(pidof "Plex Media Serv")/environ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/plexmediaserver SHELL=/sbin/nologin PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_MAX_PLUGIN_PROCS=6 LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 USER=plex PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_TMPDIR=/tmp PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_HOME=/usr/lib/plexmediaserver PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin PWD=/ LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SHLVL=1 HOME=/var/lib/plexmediaserver LOGNAME=plex PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR=/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support _=/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex Media Server

Which is set via this now :
awk '/LANG/' /etc/sysconfig/PlexMediaServer export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

So it seems the dev added that change at some point …or its been default forever …never looked till tonight :slight_smile: I might poke around the code when I get time and see if I can figure out in a more technical fashion whats going on with some of my artists doing weird things …

Thanks again for the help!

8

You should see a clear error message in the Plex logs if the codepage is indeed the issue.

A simple test would be to name a movie with a special character.
Then put a SRT subtitle file beside it.
If the subtitle appears in the list of selectable subtitles on the movie’s preplay page, then the LMA agent is working properly. If the subtitle doesn’t show up, LMA is failing. (Provided there isn’t some trivial reason like wrong file permissions)

Here is a title for testing: Café Society (2016)
the accent over the e would trigger the issue.