I’ve been experimenting with the “Plex Music Scanner” and “Plex Music” scanners to figure out how to optimize my local music catalog.
Plex Music has the most bells and whistles, but it makes a mess of the catalog, grouping separate albums into multi-disc albums, ignoring local tags, and just making a nuisance of itself. Is there a way to override these groupings, or request corrections to the Plex metadata store?
Plex Music Scanner just uses my embedded tags, which means the catalog is correct, but I cannot get it to display artwork, whether embedded in the FLAC files, or from files named cover.jpg or folder.jpg. I have enabled the Local Media Access agents for both Artists and Albums, but it doesn’t seem to help. Am I missing something?
The newer Plex Music agent is a lot more powerful than the ‘Plex Music Scanner’ agent, but it is also much pickier about the accuracy of your tags, as well as the folder structure of your media files. For instance, if your folder structure looks like below, and the artist or album tags in the files don’t match the folder names, Plex may not get it right. You’d think it would be less dependent on the folder structure if the tags are right, but that’s the way it is.
/Music
/artist - album
01 - track name
02 - track name
or
/Music
/artist
/album
01 - track name
02 - track name
The ‘Plex Music’ agent is also less tolerant of missing or incorrect/inconsistent metadata tags. Believe me, I was involved in some of the testing of the new agent, and I was surprised to find how many problems I had in my tags!
Once I had all those issues ironed out, the new scanner turned out to be much better than the old one. In addition, the “Plex Dance” is almost never required with the new agent.
One additional note: This pretty much applies to non-classical music. Plex has some work to do to be truly useful for correctly-tagged classical music.
Thanks for the tip, but my metadata is correct, I’ve tweaked it to death. So is my folder structure. I am having trouble with a very large CD compilation. The structure looks like
The ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST tags match the folder name, the ALBUM tag matches the album folder name (as by the ripping software I’m using), and there are no DISCNUMBER and TOTALDISCS tags (I removed them). But when it gets to disc 42 (Bach 333-042- …), disc 43 shows up as a “Disc 11” inside of the disc 42 album instead of as a separate album, and I am trying to figure out where disc 44 went. It defies logic. When I use “Plex Media Scanner”, the albums/discs show correctly, but no artwork.
Is this the “Bach 333” 222-disc box set? Are you trying to get Plex to catalog it as 222 individual albums, rather than a box set? If so, you’re buying a major headache, I think. I don’t know if you’re going to be able to do that.
Well, the thing is each disc already has a different album title (and I want to keep it that way), so treating it as a 222-disc album doesn’t work either. Plex Music is being too smart, but not smart enough to just use my tags.
I’d rather just use “Plex Music Scanner” at this point, but it is not picking up the album artwork from the files. It’s supposed to, isn’t it?
Yeah, it should, if they are in the right place and have the right names. Album covers should be cover.jpg (there are other acceptable names, but this is the one you mentioned), and it should be in the same folder as the tracks. folder.jpg in the “Bach, Johann Sebastian” folder should be picked up as the artist.
