Sometime in the last two weeks, my music library started having issues. I’ve listed them separately, and any help you can provide would be appreciated.
First: I have restarted the Plex server multiple times and restarted the NAS I run in on. I raised the server cache from 40MB to 100MB after reading that suggestion somewhere. The listings keep the album art and descriptions, and in some cases the album name. I have everything properly named by Artist->Album->Track. The metadata should be good because these are all MP3 rips of CDs I legally own, about 340 albums or so.
Fix Match finds the proper information for every affected album, but when I select it it does nothing.
All of my albums with artists named “Various Artists” (soundtracks, compilations, etc.) showed the artist as Elvis Presley. I was able to fix this by manually renaming the artist and they returned to normal.
Many albums from artists I own multiple albums of changed to “Unknown Artist” or to “Artist + someone”. I would manually edit the artist name and the first one would save properly, but when I edited the next one it wouldn’t save and the first one I edited would revert to what it was before I edited it. This seems to work now, as changes I made Saturday that did not originally show did show up correctly last night.
Similar to #3, I have two albums that refuse any changes. One is Tidal by Fiona Apple. It shows the album name and track list correctly, but when I change the artist name it ping-pongs to the F spot than returns to the U for Unknown Artist. I can see the album tiles move back and forth when I save the change. The second is the Metallica black album. It shows Unknown Artist and Unknown Album despite the track list and album art being correct. No changes I make of any kind will save when I edit it.
I have several video game soundtracks where the author and/or track titles are in Japanese. This had never been a problem before, but now everything not in English shows up as a series of question marks. Fix Match still shows the Japanese characters, but as I state in problem 1, it will not fix the issue. Selecting an English translation which is sometimes available also does nothing.
I’ve had my Plex server for over five years and had no issues, and none of my other libraries have any issues. I’m grateful for anyone’s help. Thanks!
Bad idea. This now will turn every other Various Artists release into an Elvis release.
I’d revert this edit and do it right (see below).
Good metadata have nothing to do with the source of the media files. See below.
Don’t make such large jumps. Your NAS has small enough RAM, so don’t make it consume even more without need. Revert that for the time being. It’s certainly not necessary for a few hundred albums to change that value from the default.
That is basically the same issue as with Elvis above. Don’t edit artist names within Plex.
Good. But you need to follow these rules:
The key is in the embedded meta tags. Plex requires you to use the Album Artist tag (which is a separate tag than the regular Artist tag)
It must not contain more than one name. Which means with collaboration-type albums, you must decide which artist shall be the “main” one. Then tag only this name. For traditional sampler-style albums, there is the special artist name “Various Artists” that you can use.
All tracks of one particular album must have the same Album Artist tagged (each track can have a different Artist tag)
You must use the folder structure “Album Artist” > “Album Title” > [Tracks]
All albums which are stored inside one particular “Album Artist” folder must have identical content in their Album Artist meta tags.
Use a dedicated meta tagger app to set the Album Artist tag. The file properties tab of the Windows file explorer is inadequate.
I recommend mp3tag. It can help you with turning folder names into tags, or vice versa, generating folder structures and file names from meta tags.
Depending on how much editing you’ve performed already, it might be easier to scrap the whole music library and create it afresh – after you’ve gone through and changed the folder structure and embedded meta tags acording to the rules I laid out above.
If you’ve only edited a few albums/artists, perform the Plex Dance with just these.
If you are using mp3 files, set your meta data editor to use ID3v2.4 tags.
Thanks for the help. I’m making the changes you recommend. Most of my files only show Artist, not Album Artist. It’s just really odd because I haven’t had any issues for years and I made no changes to the settings for that library.
