I love Plex, bought a NAS for it, migrated all my content on it and became an ambassador trying to convince the world it’s the way to go.
Having said that, I struggle with the music meta data, particularly on genre & style. I usually know what I want to listen so that doesn’t really bother me but a lot of Spotify user rely on genre or style playlist and of course here it’s a fail. That prevent people around me to adopt Plex and get rid of their music subscriptions. I have 17 44 artists & 160 893 tracks and Plex sees 785 genres & 475 styles, I’m not even sure to undertsand the difference by the way. Of course my music files are a mess and it start from the source. How do you guy manage this? I honestly cannot correct this one by one in PLEX UI, and it doesn’t really fix the issue at the source I guess.
Is there any software, free or paid, that can help to update meta data on a massive collection of tracks & folders?
Is there a quick way in Plex to input on the fly a meta data field?
Server Version#: 1.21.3.4014
Player Version#: Version 1.26.0.1531-92029
Is there any software, free or paid, that can help to update meta data on a massive collection of tracks & folders?
beets and MusicBrainz Picard are two (free) tagging options that can do mass-tagging, pulling genres from online sources such as Discogs, Last.fm and Musicbrainz, or if you’re so inclined, select and whittle down genres in batches yourself.
You’ll have to set Plex to take Genres “only from Embedded”, but it works reasonably well.
Mind you, unlike with most other music libraries, with Plex there’s no way to tag individual songs with a genre - Plex only handles Genre on the album level, so if you have an album with nine songs tagged as “Rock” and one song tagged as “Reggae”, Plex gives all ten songs the genres “Reggae, Rock”.
I agree that Musicbrainz Picard is probably the best option to tag your files en masse. But I always caution that the online sources (Musicbrainz, Last.FM, Discogs, etc.) are full of errors, so the tags probably won’t be perfect. Depending on your tolerance for those errors, you may want to start with mass-tagging, then follow up with a tool to manually fix those errors. For that, I recommend MP3Tag (for Windows or Mac). Picard isn’t well suited to editing tags in individual tracks.
Once your embedded tags are in good shape, you’ll want to make sure Plex is properly configured to use them. It’s more than the one checkbox.
If we’re talking about classical music, you’ll find that Plex has some shortcomings. Plex only makes use of a small sub-set of the tags that can be in your files, and “Composer” isn’t one of them. My solution has been to use the composer as “Album Artist.” There is a feature request to improve this, but it has been a long time coming.
But I wonder why there isn’t an online database Plex could do a look up with, as it’s doing for Movies with imdb, TVDB & the “Plex Movie” agent?
For music, Does Plex have to rely 100% on the local meta data?
Plex uses MusicBrainz for album releases. Of course, just like any of your other media, it needs to be named and organized appropriately for Plex to do its job.
That should be how your music library is handled by default, unless you selected to Prefer local metadata in your library options.
