Server Version#: Version 1.18.7.2438
Player Version#: Web/Android app/Roku - N/A
The Music Library was working well enough with all metadata from my meticulously maintained MP3 and FLAC tags - including embedded high-resolution album art. But a growing number of artists and songs were being tossed into a number of ‘Various Artists’ groupings - even though the metadata was 100% correct.
So I decided to do the ‘Plex Dance’ and things became much worse.
Spent the last 3 hours reading every thread on metadata, artist artwork, album artwork and still can’t find a solution for my problem with missing artist and album artwork. No matter how many Plex Dances I do, no matter how many times I clobber and recreate the Music Library, it always comes up with missing artist and album artwork as in the examples below.
What can I do to troubleshoot and fix this to get my artist artwork and pristine, high-res album art back?
There is no folder structure for the individual songs. These are simply 1600 songs curated from my larger collection and simply all sitting in one folder called “Music” - the same way I’ve been using Plex since 2013 on my Synology NAS. And it’s all worked fine until recently the 18.x series of PMS versions started failing to collect fully-tagged artists correctly and instead bucketed them into ‘Various Artists.’
Here are screenshots of the Music Folder advanced settings as well as snips on MusicMonkey’s display of metadata. I’m crazy particular about my MP3 tags and album art (all of it is high-res, never lower than 600x600 - often much larger) - and it’s always worked fine until recently.
Glad to get any help troubleshooting and resolving this.
Plex recently overhauled the music scanning agent. It’s a lot more accurate, and the Plex Dance should no longer be necessary, but for reasons unknown, it is also more sensitive to the folder structure. I’ve been having that conversation with Plex as well. I believe that’s what happened here.
If you want to verify that that’s the case, you can try moving one of these albums into a folder named for the album (folder name identical to the ‘Album’ tag). If it correctly catalogs the album, we’ll have an answer.
Whups, I just noticed your library is set to the ‘Plex Music Scanner.’ That’s the old scanner. What I said about the scanner being more accurate, and the Plex Dance no longer necessary, is true for the new ‘Plex Music’ selection.
You seem to have had more convo’s with Plex team, but from what I’ve gathered, is it correct info that any albums with a DASH indicating that that album is EP or a single will actually have a negative impact on the Plex Scanner and will result in bad metadata.
For those of us not only having the Various Artists issue, we now have the issue with singles and EP’s that were once identified with an - EP at the end of the title. From what I seen and experienced, that DASH causes the scanner to misidentify the albums and will identify it as something else. It’s a bit maddening since some albums purchased from iTunes actually uses the DASH to label EP’s and Singles. Anyone who has used dashes in their music library can no longer use them. Can you confirm what I’ve come across? Dashes in Album Titles ruin the apparent new folder structure that Plex uses.
I have dashes in both the folder structure and in the embedded tags. That includes album titles, track titles, album artist titles, and track artist titles. So far, I haven’t had that problem.
The new music system works best if every track, even if it is a single, is inside a sub-folder under the artist. If you don’t do that, the new Plex Music has a tendency to mis-match.
The new system used by Plex has a lot of bugs and quirks, and I’m hoping it’s not considered a finished product yet.
Thanks for the assist, @beckfield. I changed the setting Scanner setting from what they were to Scanner = “Plex Music” and Agent = “Plex Music” and it got much worse. Now all of my music is bundled under one crazy entry where it’s picked a random artist, a random track and a random album cover all slammed together.
I’ve both done the (you said unnecessray) ‘Plex Dance’ a couple times with various settings and clobbered the Library outright and set it up exactly as before except that I changed the advanced Music Library settings to Scanner = “Plex Music” and Agent = “Plex Music” since you said these are the new scanners (how would anyone know this without your knowledge?!?!) - and keep getting the same munged-together single entry for everything.
@ChuckPa - I honestly hate to bother you. But I’m tagging you on the chance you can help out or point me in the right direction. You’re kind of a genius here - and you’ve been able to fix all of my previous tough-to-resolve issues.
@beckfield has already pointed out the root issue:
The total absence of a folder structure in your music.
You don’t even have subfolders “per artist”.
1600 files in a flat structure won’t work anymore.
Sorry @OttoKerner. Can you show me in Plex release notes where the flat folder structure support has been removed? I’ve watched each and every release for the last 7 years and there is no statement to that effect.
I created a directory structure to validate this, and the problem persists. So something is broken.
Plex documentation requires Movies, TV shows and Music Videos to be explicitly organized. But the same requirement isn’t true for Music. In fact, Plex documentation explicitly calls out this case via the Personal Media Artists/Albums agent here that metadata is the driver for Music, not folder structure:
Personal Media Artists/Albums : The Personal Media Artists/Albums agent is designed to recognize albums that have not been released commercially and so won’t appear in online music databases. Metadata embedded in most music file formats will be read and used if Local Media Assets is enabled.
Further supporting this approach, the following Plex support article calls out only the requirement to ensure “Local Media Assets” has been enabled here:
Identifying Music Media Using Embedded Metadata
Some applications embed metadata in the music files, generally as an ID3 or M4A tag. If your music files have embedded data you’d like to use, you can:
Ensure “Local Media Assets” has been enabled for the Agent you’re using in your music Library
Make sure that “Local Media Assets” is at the top of the Agents list
When creating or editing the music library, ensure that the Use embedded tags advanced option is enabled
I’ve seen no statement that previous support was deprecated and that file and folder structures are now a requirement for Plex to correctly catalog, tag and organize music.
Most importantly, this is a regression in previous functionality. It’s a regression that’s unexpected and hasn’t been documented in release notes. Generally in software development, this is considered a bug. A bug I’m asking for help to resolve.
It would be great if you had insider information that the lack of a folder structure (that’s working perfectly with 3 friends using Plex in the same way I am) is somehow no longer supported - or why it’s specifically not working on my PMS due to some insider information you may have. And if you could have the existing Plex documentation revised to reflect these new requirements you’re describing, that would be helpful as well.
I appreciate your help - and look forward to a clear reason why this is working elsewhere, but not on my Plex server. Thank you.
The Plex documentation has never said it would work with a flat file list. In fact, it has always strongly recommended an organized folder structure, even when depending on embedded tags.
The fact that you are only now experiencing problems due to your file organization (or lack thereof) is frustrating, I agree, but it is not in any way inconsistent with Plex’s documentation. If it was working in your case before recent changes, you were lucky.
I continue to appreciate the outreach. And while I’m not using a Premium music library, I’d prefer to keep this discussion elevated to the issue itself.
Does Plex (specifically PMS on Synology NAS devices runnign DMS 6.x or higher) support accurate tagging and sorting of music based on embedded metadata without an explicit Artist | Album hierarchical structure?
If an explicit Artist | Album fire structure is required, when did this change? This wasn’t always required - it previously worked for the last 5-6 years.
Why do 3 other Plex servers (2 on the same Synology NAS devices and PMS versions) not exhibit this problem?
Why when implementing the recommended folder structure to validate, the problem persists (i.e., why does doing the recommended thing still not solve the problem)?
Bottom line, it would be great to get a clear, explicit, authoritative answer on support - not just varying interpretations - so I can either move to another solution for hosting music or resolve the bug/DB glitch or other issue that I’m experiencing and continue to enjoy Plex to its fullest in the way it has worked for 6+ years without release notes saying this functionality has been deprecated.
If rolling back to a previous version will fix this, that’s be great too. But if this is a bug, fixing it would be even better.
One of the big problems is that there are actually two support article sections for Music. One refers to “Basic” and “Premium” libraries - and if understand correctly, there is no longer a difference and the two different types don’t actually exist any longer… It is an old (and probably outdated) article
That article and related articles can be found here
The other Music support article, which is primarily for the new music system, is under the “Features” section of the support article, under “Music Functionality” There you can find “Correcting Your Music Content Matches” which states you need to use a proper folder structure of Music/ArtistName/AlbumName/TrackNumber -
The two sections of Support articles for music libraries are similar, but not identical, and Plex needs to align the guidelines to make it clear which method is the proper way. I would think that replacing the old articles with the newer ones, and moving it out of the “Features” section and into the “Organizing your Media” section would make a lot of sense.
Thanks for taking a moment to pitch in @leelynds and @ChuckPa (it’s been a while, Chuck).
It sounds like you’re both saying the original “Basic” functionality that supported a flat file structure has been fully replaced with a “Premium” functionality that requires every piece of music to reside within a named folder hierarchy in order to be indexed and played by Plex.
It’s disappointing that a redundant file structure is now required when the metadata alone was all that was needed for the previous 6 years under the “Basic” functionality.
And it’s a bummer that my beloved Plex no longer provides functional parity with competing music servers and streamers - none of which require a folder hierarchy to index and operate (Sonos, Stremio, Kodi, Mezzmo, Emby, or free solutions like MediaMonkey, iTunes, VLC, RocketPlayer).
Since a folder hierarchy is now the requirement, just two questions:
Can you confirm there’s no combination of Music Library settings/agents available in 18.x builds to regain the industry standard (and former Plex “Basic”) functionality to automatically group artists and album art via metadata as before?
Can you confirm the new expected Plex functionality (i.e., metadata alone - whether from a friend’s USB stick or from a curated library of music) is no longer sufficient for Plex to index and play music?
If so, it might be a good time to scrub the old documentation for the “Basic” music offering in favor of the “Premium” solution that does less - and reconcile the former documentation differences to alleviate any confusion.
And I’m glad to put up a feature request for votes. But it seems futile to request a feature that was already included in the Plex platform but was deliberately removed.
Thanks gentlemen. Glad to get closure on these two points to resolve this conclusively. Much appreciated.
First, Hi Doug. It’s indeed been a long time! I hope life is treating you well?
The documentation, as I’ve always seen it and used it, for a Basic music library, has been in the structure I showed above.
I did find that structure was not the most compatible (or really compatible at all) with a Premium library.
I think you know I like keeping everything in its proper place to ease the curation duties. (since we last chatted, I now have quite the beastly setup over here with a great deal of top-quality content I’ve ripped)
While I’ve never paid much attention to iTunes, IIRC, didn’t it also keep everything in a similar Artist / Album / Song structure?
Also, IIRC, iTunes provided the option, which was default in some versions, to reorganize (rename & restructure) your media files into precisely the structure used above? Please correct me if incorrect as it’s truly been long time.
Help me understand which “Industry standards” you’re referring to so I can specifically go create a controlled test case and replicate what you’re seeing ?
