Ok so I have meticulously tagged my music and I have Plex or plexamp for that matter to listen to…what other music management system do people recommend to adhere to the meticulous tagged music I have…iTunes doesn’t musicbee doesn’t and jriver doesn’t also …they screwed up all my music when importing it that it’s like completely starting over again. Do you guys know of another program to go along with Plex
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I’m along for the ride. I too don’t care for how Plex handles music.
For example it has decided that all of my Various Artists compilations are indexed under the artist name “Jan Hammer.” My music is pretty carefully tagged, but the folder structure must not be chef’s kiss 
perfect.
@jspurgeon09 what didn’t you like about Musicbee? I just read about it and it seems to have lots of fans. Where did it fail you?
I’ve been using MP3Tag recently, and Media Monkey prior to that. My main goals were to clean up tagging, and to reorganize the folders. I ran into issues with multi-disc sets, Various Artists collections, and worst of all, Various Artists collections in multi-disc sets.
One key detail: Plex uses the “Album Artist” tag for displaying artists in the music collection; the Artist tag (or Contributing Artist in Windows tagging) is considered the artist performing on any one particular song, and that info will only be displayed inside that album, not for sorting purposes on the main music page.
Here was my end result (cutting, pasting and slightly re-writing from my other post):
When I ran into issues with discs being separated, and having various naming issues, I redid my ID3 tags using MP3Tag, and spruced up my folder structure. ID3 tags are set like this.
Single-disc albums are easy:
- Make sure Album Artist is set, which is always very important. Then Artist, Album, etc, and you can leave the Disc Number empty.
For multi-disc albums:
- Disc numbers must be labeled properly in the Disc Number tag, and the track numbers reset per disc (so each disc starts over with track 1 again. “Disc 1, Track 1”, then on the second disc, “Disc 2, Track 1”, etc)
- The Album name is just the actual name, no “Disc 1” appended to it.
- For a various artists album, I’d set up an Album Artist of “Various Artists”, with the Artist (sometimes “Contributing Artist”) listed as the actual performer of the individual track.
I redid the folder structure based on the ID3 tags (Most MP3 naming programs can do that by setting up your naming scheme). All tracks from a multi-disc album go in one folder, and the file naming (and ID3 tags!) is what separates the tracks into discs.
Here are some samples of what my file/folder and ID3 structures look like now:
D:\Music\Bad Lieutenant\Never Cry Another Tear\01 - Sink Or Swim.mp3
ID3 Tag Info:
Album: “Never Cry Another Tear”
Album Artist: Bad Lieutenant
Artist: Bad Lieutenant
Disc No:
Track No: 1
Next up, an album by one artist, but with a song that involves a second artist.
D:\Music\Dwight Yoakam\The Very Best Of Dwight Yoakam\06 - Streets Of Bakersfield.mp3
ID3 Tag Info:
Album: “The Very Best Of Dwight Yoakam”
Album Artist: Dwight Yoakam
Artist: Dwight Yoakam with Buck Owens
Disc No:
Track No: 6
Next, a single artist, with multiple discs:
D:\Music\ABBA\Thank You For The Music\Disc 1 - 03 - He Is Your Brother.mp3
D:\Music\ABBA\Thank You For The Music\Disc 4 - 02 - Dream World
ID3 Tag info for the first song:
Album: “Thank You For The Music”
Album Artist: ABBA
Artist: ABBA
Disc No: 1
Track No: 3
Now for multi-disc various artists:
D:\Music\Various Artists\Forrest Gump The Soundtrack\Disc 1 - 08 - I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch).flac
D:\Music\Various Artists\Forrest Gump The Soundtrack\Disc 2 - 04 - Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season).flac
ID3 tag info for the first song:
Album: “Forrest Gump: The Soundtrack”
Album Artist: Various Artists
Artist: Four Tops
Disc No: 1
Track No: 8
I had a ton of problems with Plex properly capturing my albums recently (Based on threads here, I’m not alone), so I finally redid my tags and file structure. When Plex re-crawled the collection, everything looks much better now. It was useful to fix both the folder structure and the ID3 tags to get it right.
This also might be useful reading for you.
And Plex’s official rules for music tagging and organizing:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200265296-adding-music-media-from-folders/
Plex is the only one that works and imports everything tagged correctly…other music programs muck it all up …mi don’t understand why this is so when it clearly states exactly what cafe_diem is doing by tags and folder structure…I have no problems with Plex just other music programs…I find that very wierd and frustrating…is it other music programs own wierd way of importing and organizing that’s different than Plex
I ended up in a very similar place and my results are pretty OK.
I do a couple of things differently because I want my file system to contain, in a regular format, the essential info for an album.
- Against Plex guidance, I include album artist name and a date in the album folder name.
- I have started to make the track file names include the artist and album name. (Not the album artist, the track artist… so on a compilation, if I am looking at a file name in some other context, I still have good info right there.)
- I also make my track numbers lead with the disc number.
That adds up to something like:
\music\John Doe\John Doe - Greatest Hits (1999)\101 - John Doe - Greatest Hits - Guest Singer - Some Track.mp3
The Various Artists situation is still bit of a mess.
One thing I started doing to ease the burden on the VA directory is to create “virtual VAs” for other categories of music. For example my club-style music compilations have the album artist “Club Tracks” instead of VA. That makes it much easier to browse the collection. This is helpful since Plex’s genre support is poor.
But honestly, most of the time when I actually listen to music I dig through the file system and play with VLC…
Hi there - new Plex user here, coming over from Google Play. I’ve got a folder with all my mp3s in it, I’ve got the Plex app looking there, and it’s importing the music correctly.
BUT the artist/album names in Plex are completely fubar; everything’s coded Various Artists. Do they need to be in individual folders within the main folder in order to parse correctly? Because I just have all the files in there.
ID3 tags are all correct, but it seems like it’s just taking that data and doing whatever it wants with it.
Mediamonkey is the best music manager that I have used.
Foobar is good too, and perhaps more advanced, but has a steeper learning curve.
Picard, is a useful tool, its not so much a music manager, but a tagger which uses musicbrainz (the same thing that plex uses).
cd ripper: cuetools ripper, EAC, or dbpoweramp are all great choices and use accurate rip to help verify your ripped files are error free.
My workflow is generally:
- rip with cuetools ripper
- tag with musicbrainz picard
- play/manage/rename/clean up any other taggings with mediamonkey
- and plex/plexamp of course for playback
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