I’m in the process of rebuilding my music library, mostly because the album art was lo-quality.
I deleted the previous library, emptied trash, cleaned bundles and optimized database before I started. I’ve removed all of the hidden and operating files Windows has created over the last 20 years, and placed new images as folder.jpg or cover.jpg within the album folder.
I’ve also removed all embedded artwork from within the files, and then added higher quality images as embedded metadata. The library is a “Plex Premium Music” library, and Local Media Assets is enabled and at the top of the priority list for every category under the albums and Artists section.
This works perfectly about 95% of the time, but occasionally Plex finds some lower quality artwork and uses that image. When I discover it, I check the folder for a bad image, and check the file itself for embedded image(s) and cannot find anything obviously wrong.
Is there a better name to use for the image files to ensure they are used? The support articles don’t seem to mention anything about that. Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated.
I can’t recommend that. Simply go without embedded pictures. It just doesn’t make sense to embed a 2 MB big jpg into an mp3 which itself is only 8 MB big.
And that 10 times – for each track of an album…
Do these albums have a subfolder in them, named scans or artwork?
The only reason I embed artwork is so that I get some sort of an image on my phone and other media players. I don’t use sync of any kind, I’m old fashioned and copy them to the device.
The embedded images (and the the sidecar files) are not huge - not 2MB for sure, just better than the 220X220px images that were previously associated. LOL - I think that years ago that was the recommended size to use. Fortunately, I ignored the same recommendations that said that 128kbps was good enough for an MP3, and have always encoded at 320kbps
In any event, regardless of the size of the files or duplication of image data, I still would like to know where Plex is grabbing the low quality images from. Is it possible some information is retained somehow from the old library? Database problem?
I do have a suspicion that the LMA is sometimes not delivering results in time. So that images from online sources are used instead.
But it only affects a fraction of a library.
And if you refresh the affected albums manually, it usually succeeds. So recreating the issue and having the evidence in log files is very, very difficult.
Ya know, I suspected that myself. Like you say, a refresh usually fixes it, if not the first one, a second one. It’s odd that remote metadata seems to be found first.
Thanks, I guess I just have to expect a few glitches once in a while.
First off, thank for all your tips for images (here and in another couple of threads I can’t find now) I’ve also abandoned using the embedded images, your point only made sense, and only use one image in the album folder
I’ve come across a new problem. I’ve been adding artist-poster.jpg and artist-background.jpg images as I go, and it works most of the time, unless Plex thinks it can’t find a match. I have two examples that have given me grief. George Harrison (ex-Beatle) and Cowboy Junkies.
For George Harrison, Plex comes up with the horrible info that “there are at least two artists with the name George Harrison”. No matter how you try to fix the match, automatically, or using any of the agents specifically, the same result sticks. However, it does download a pile of posters to select from, all of the correct George Harrison. It seems because of this multiple match problem, Plex will not use or even recognize the images in the artist folder.
For Cowboy Junkies, Plex finds the artist fine, adds some info about them, but refuses to use the background and poster images. The same thing, it downloads posters, but doesn’t recognize the local images. In this case, the best match I can get is only about 60%. Maybe the low match probability has some affect?
I have refreshed metadata, Plex danced, and refreshed any amount of times with the same results. The local images are basically ignored.
Any hints on how to make this work for situations like this? I have a couple of other artists that have given me the same problem.
