Music metadata and organization

General Discussions
1

I’m a new Plex user and just copied over my ~500 albums of mp3s. I ran scripts to organize the folders as directed by the help article I found.
\Music\Artist - Album## - Song.mp3

I also didn’t change any settings. It’s now gone off and recognized everything.

Once I did that, I noticed other articles that discuss whether to have Plex prefer local metadata and some articles that discuss how to handle soundtracks & multi-disk albums. The latter seems to diverge from the folder structure that seems “officially” recommended.

I’m curious about both of those topics. What is the current best thinking for how to handle these?

  1. Prefer local metadata. Should I turn that on and make the best source of truth what I already have in my mp3s and update them over time?
  2. File/folder structure. What’s the current best thinking here? I can adapt… :slight_smile: Thanks!
2

The online databases (Last.FM, Gracenote, Musicbrainz, etc.) are convenient, but they are too full of errors for my taste, so I put in the work to get my music tagged properly and set Plex up to prefer local metadata. The recent updates to Plex’s handling of metadata have made huge improvements, including reducing the need for the “Plex Dance (a workaround for a variety of bugs where Plex wouldn’t recognize metadata changes),” and it has helped me find errors in my metadata. But that also means that Plex is pickier than it used to be, so if you go that route, you will want to be as precise as you can. In the past, correctly-tagged media meant the file/folder structure wasn’t as important as it was when relying on the databases, but I’m not sure that’s true now.

3

plex should always rely on tags before file/folder organization, but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case.

I am not against inferring metadata from folder/filenames, but it should always be secondary to tag data.

although personally I would prefer the option to ignore folder/filenames entirely (using ONLY tags).

1 Like
4

I agree completely.

5

Thanks for the reply…

What’s the status of needing to do the “Plex Dance”? Now that I’ve changed the “prefer local metadata” flag, do I need to dance to have it work correctly? Or is changing the flag plus “scanning library files” good enough?

6

Surely you forgot some folders here.
It absolutely should be

\Music
   \Artist
      \Album
         1. Artist - Song.mp3 (or whichever you prefer, as long as the embedded meta tags are in order)
7

I unfortunately followed the advice here (assuming no metadata):

I’ll change assuming I’ll use local metadata instead.

8

Even that one calls for an Album folder.

You should now always use the schema at the bottom of this article.
Regardless of the ‘prefer local metadata’ setting.

9

It showed this:

/Music
   /Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
      01 - Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts I-V).m4a
      02 - Welcome to the Machine.mp3
      03 - Have a Cigar.mp3
   /Foo Fighters - One By One
   /Foo Fighters - There is Nothing Left to Lose
   /U2 - Joshua Tree

I’ll change back to what you list. Thanks.

10

For multi-disc albums, should I have the files named “NN - MM - Song.mp3”? Where NN is the disk number and MM is the song number? I realize what’s in the tags for disk # is what should be relevant (I hope - hehe).

Thanks!

11

You can do it that way.
I prefer to have Disc x subfolders.
Both will work, as long as the embedded meta tags are in order.

1 Like
12

Thanks for being so helpful/responsive. Last question. Do I have to do the “plex dance” to have the prefer local flag take effect? I think it’s still using the internet lookup metadata.

13

The Dance is largely no longer necessary (for music).

Only in the case of bugs, it might still have an effect. But those bugs usually crop up with older libraries which were once created as ‘Plex Premium Music’ libraries, so that doesn’t apply in your case.

Online data lookup is still done in any case, to get additional metadata like popularity, album art, artist info, album reviews, related artists, concert info, song lyrics…

1 Like
14

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