I’m looking to lock the “genre” tags across the board so I can then run a full scan of my music library with the new metadata agent to populate style, mood, bios etc. but without losing my current genre tags and ending up with everything from 90s dance-pop like Aqua to norwegian black metal like Immortal under a hilariously (and uselessly) broad category like “Pop/Rock”. Maybe that’s how MusicBrainz organises its database, but I don’t care, it’s dumb.
Is there a way to either exclude this tag from the agent on that end, or a way to “select all” artists from that screen so I can lock them all once? Or am I seriously going to have to manually click on each and every artist via the multi-select screen to do this? Thanks!
EDIT: A way to have it leave album covers alone would be nice too.
Thanks, this is kinda on the way to getting where I want at least. I already have the library set to ‘prefer local metadata’ as my tags on the files are basically where I want them - though the scanner doesn’t seem to always respect that when I manually run a refresh with that alone.
I’ve set the Genre to “embedded tags” in the library settings but this just results in the artist genre being removed entirely when I run a refresh on an artist - presumably because there is no embedded tag for artist genre as this category only exists within Plex’s database (also occurs when set to “None”, predictably enough I suppose). This occurs even when the genre tag of every track by that artist is identical, which I would’ve thought be the logical place to get this info but whatever.
I’ve already been through the genre tagging process when I was adding my collection into Plex. All I really want is for the scanner to leave artist genre alone entirely while pulling down the rest. Not try to grab it from tags (which it apparently can’t), not erase it, not pull down the silliness from the data provider’s genre tags - just don’t touch it at all.
Normally, the conversion from old music to new music will leave locked fields alone.
If you edited them manually in Plex, they should be locked already.
Yeah, maybe 20% were locked despite having originally edited them all by hand initially, so no idea what happened there. Handling of music libraries was even more sketchy before than it seems to be now so I’ll just chalk it up to that. Styles is partly what was I wanted to be filled - mostly out of curiosity to see what kind of garbage would end up there.
In the end I just sat down and spent the time manually clicking and scrolling through a few hundred artists to highlight them all and then locked the tags in a batch from there. I never thought the music I had in my collection was as obscure all that, but a ton of it basically got nothing in the way of additional metadata of any kind when I ran the scanner over the library again. Not entirely sure it was worth the effort in the end lol. Thanks for your help though!
