Music Scraping Inaccuracy

General Discussions
1

Is there any way to improve music scraping accuracy? I’ve spent countless hours correctly tagging and embedding album art into every CD/track and Plex seems to just ignore it. If I use a non premium library it imports all the local assets just fine but then I’m missing all the artist info and artwork. It’ll take me a couple months to add all the info and artwork so I’d rather not. Plex seems to have about ~80% accuracy for regular CDs but only about 1% or 2% accuracy for Soundtracks and 0% accuracy for Musicals, Operas, Ballets and other such CDs. Some of them will get the genre correct but nothing else.

Any ideas?

2

There doesn’t seem to be any way around it. To be fair, the problem isn’t Plex’s, it’s the fault of last.FM (basic libraries) and Gracenote (Premium libraries), the services from which Plex gets that metadata. They are both based on databases that were originally editable by anyone with a computer and a modem, and they are filled with garbage. As you noticed, they are absolutely horrendous for classical music.

I finally gave up and spent the time to get my embedded tags in order. If Plex is ignoring your embedded id3 tags, make sure you’ve enabled the ‘Use embedded tags’ option in the library itself, and make sure that the Local Media Assets agent is at the top for both Albums and Artists in your server settings. If you’re not sure about how to do that, take a look at this screenshot:

It’s a lot of work, and my library apparently isn’t as big as most, but this particular headache has been eliminated since I finished.

3

Yeah that’s what I was afraid of. The more I browse through the actual databases the more I realize how much of a mess they are. Like some artist names are replaced by paragraphs explaining why this artist shouldn’t show up and another one should… I guess it’s just down to a lot of manual editing within Plex.

I often complain about the overly tyrannical nature of thetvdb.com admins but I guess they do a really good job of preventing this kind crap we see in the music dbs. Maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh on the way they do things =\

4

@techmattr said:
Yeah that’s what I was afraid of. The more I browse through the actual databases the more I realize how much of a mess they are. Like some artist names are replaced by paragraphs explaining why this artist shouldn’t show up and another one should… I guess it’s just down to a lot of manual editing within Plex.
You’ll be happier in the long run if you don’t edit the metadata within Plex. Plex does not write the tags back to your audio files, it stores them in its own database. If the database ever gets lost, you may be stuck doing it all over again.

I would find a good tag editor and do the work in the files themselves, then let Plex rebuild your library. I use EasyTag. It doesn’t let you edit every single tag defined by the id3 specification, but it edits every one that Plex currently reads, I think, including album art. For more comprehensive tags, I like PuddleTag for Linux, which, I’m told, is similar to MP3Tag for Windows.

5

@beckfield said:

@techmattr said:
Yeah that’s what I was afraid of. The more I browse through the actual databases the more I realize how much of a mess they are. Like some artist names are replaced by paragraphs explaining why this artist shouldn’t show up and another one should… I guess it’s just down to a lot of manual editing within Plex.
You’ll be happier in the long run if you don’t edit the metadata within Plex. Plex does not write the tags back to your audio files, it stores them in its own database. If the database ever gets lost, you may be stuck doing it all over again.

I would find a good tag editor and do the work in the files themselves, then let Plex rebuild your library. I use EasyTag. It doesn’t let you edit every single tag defined by the id3 specification, but it edits every one that Plex currently reads, I think, including album art. For more comprehensive tags, I like PuddleTag for Linux, which, I’m told, is similar to MP3Tag for Windows.

That’s the problem though is that all my files are tagged correctly but Plex just doesn’t read them well. What’s strange is that while the scraping DBs do seem like a mess all the other applications seem to pull correct info for almost every album (roughly 95% accuracy) while Plex is at about ~50-60% accuracy. So if I want my music correctly labeled with correct info in Plex I’m stuck with tons of manual editing.

6

There is also an issue with some character recognition that stops Plex to get ID3 tag properly.

7

@techmattr said:

That’s the problem though is that all my files are tagged correctly but Plex just doesn’t read them well. What’s strange is that while the scraping DBs do seem like a mess all the other applications seem to pull correct info for almost every album (roughly 95% accuracy) while Plex is at about ~50-60% accuracy. So if I want my music correctly labeled with correct info in Plex I’m stuck with tons of manual editing.

Can you provide some screenshots? I’d like to see the following:

  1. Your tag editor showing the embedded tags in an album that Plex doesn’t load correctly.
  2. The Settings > Server > Agents > Artists > Premium Music settings
  3. The Settings > Server > Agents > Albums > Premium Music settings (this is the same screenshot I provided in my first reply above).
  4. The Advanced page when you Edit your music library.
8

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So according to Last.fm I need to put Foghat in the Artist and Black Sabbath in the Album artist in order for these to show up correctly. So… there are two issues with that. First… it’s stupid. I don’t want to go to Black Sabbath (who only has one song on the Soundtrack) to find the Dazed and Confused Soundtrack. Second… it doesn’t display properly in most media players. It might end up correct in Plex but not anything else. I don’t want to keep two copies of music just to have different tags. For example… if I have Foghat in the Artist then in my car the album will be split into 14 different locations (14 different artists) and I won’t have any way of playing the album song 1 through 14. I tried it in BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Ford and Toyota all with the same result.

9

Okay, since the library is set to use embedded tags, using the tags for that track, I would expect the following in Plex:

Plex Artists page: Dazed and Confused Soundtrack (this comes from Album Artist tag).
‘Dazed and Confused Soundtrack’ Artist page in Plex: one album entitled “Dazed and Confused Soundtrack” (from Album tag).
Track listing in Album page (this track):
2. Slow Ride -Foghat Dazed and Confused Soundtrack (from Artist tag)

I agree, the above is stupid. Fortunately, with ‘Use embedded tags’ checked, what Last.FM thinks is irrelevant.

Here’s how I would tag this album:
Title: [track name only - no artist] e.g., “Slow Ride” <— Each track has its own title
Artist: Foghat <— each track has artist for that track
Album: Dazed and Confused Soundtrack <— Every track has same Album
Album Artist: Various Artists

This will create an “artist” called “Various Artists.” If you look at that Artist page, you will see one album named “Dazed and Confused Soundtrack.” If you click on that Album to look at the Album details, you’ll see the track listing with the individual track artist listed right next to the track name. Here is a similar album from my library:

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My Artist page looks like this (I deliberately set the Sort Name for the ‘Various Artists’ artist as 'aaaa Various Artists, so it would be stuck to the top of the page. If you want it at the bottom, set Sort Name to ‘zzzz Various Artists’.):

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I have several ‘Various Artist’ albums, mostly soundtracks. The Various Artists artist page looks like this:

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This isn’t ideal, but it’s the best way I’ve found to handle Various Artist albums. I wish Plex would list the Cocktail album on my Beach Boys Artist page because of track 6, but that’s a popular feature request that I’m still hoping for.

This should make for consistent behavior among music players on your computer, but it doesn’t solve your issue in cars. The only way I know to do that is to put all these tracks in folders. My car has an SD card reader, so on my SD card I have the following folder structure:

root
–>Soundtracks
------>Cocktail
----------> 10 Cocktail tracks
------>Grease
----------> 24 Grease tracks

10

@beckfield I marked your most recent post as the answer because I believe from a technical standpoint… that is the answer. That is something I’ve tried and while it mostly works it still breaks in most of my other media players such as vehicles. I’m most likely going to end up just creating a separate directory for various artists albums tagged to work in the car. Thanks for the help and thorough replies.

If anyone else has a better solution for “various” albums I’m sure everyone would love to hear you chime in :slight_smile: