Music Sonic Fingerprint

General Discussions
1

I have recently upgraded to a Plex Pass and I am trying to test the sonic fingerprint feature to correctly match some music metadata, however, the feature does not seem to be working.

I have created a new premium music library and pointed it to a folder containing an album. It is in the format,
Artist
-----Album
----------Tracks

All of the tracks in the folder are named, but they are named incorrectly.

I enable the premium features on the library and have ensured that the “Use embedded tags” check box is not selected.

I was expecting Plex to use the sonic fingerprinting to identify the tracks correctly but it seems to just be using the ID3 tags in the files. (I renamed the files but this does not change the way Plex identifies them). When I make changes to the files I have been using the “update library” and “refresh all” options to get Plex to update.

The Plex server is running on Windows and is Version 1.5.5.3634.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks

3

Thanks for your reply.

Unfortunately, what you describe in you reply has been my experience too. I was hoping for more Shazam like functionality. My collection is mostly well tagged but I was hoping that this would will in the gaps, it certainly sounds like it should from the marketing blurb, however, it seems to fall very short of that.

Does anyone else have any experience of this? Are my expectation way off the mark here?

4

You’re expectations aren’t off the mark - Gracenote’s ability to meet them is.

I gave up on Gracenote and Last.FM a long time ago. They are both so full of errors that I consider them absolutely useless, especially for classical music.

I don’t know how Last.FM got started, but Gracenote started out by buying CDDB, which was a database of music album information that anyone with a pulse could add to and edit. So, naturally, it was full of junk because too many people who didn’t really know what they were doing tried to add info the database, but didn’t take much care in the accuracy of what they entered. Gracenote eventually closed off public access to the database, but they seem to have put little or no effort into cleaning up all that junk. So it remains useless.

I put in the effort over a couple of months, to get my embedded metadata into good shape, and configured Plex to prefer that over online data. It took some up-front work, but my headaches are mostly gone. (The remaining headaches will go away once Plex expands their support for more ID3 tags.) :confused:

5

Thanks for your replies. It sounds like I will just have to put the work in a get the tags right.

6

@beckfield it sounds like you’ve conquered the music beast as well as anyone. Can to give us a brief overview of how you handle new media when adding to your collection?

I’m interested in seeing what programs you use and the functionality of them. For example what do you use for mbedded IDs? What do you use for file naming and album/artist directory naming?

how do you handle situations where you might have the same album multiple ways such as MP3 and FLAC versions of the same album?

My Movies/Show handling is on auto pilot so to speak but my music handling is basically all brute force and time consuming. So I know how I handle this mess but I figure there has got to be a better way and I want to know how other handle music. :slight_smile:

Thanks,
Carlo

7

My folder structure (Linux, by the way). Since the tags are in good shape, this isn’t all that important:

Music
 Classical            <--(Plex "Classical" Library points here)
  Beethoven           <--(composer)
   9 Symphonien       <--(album title)
    01 - Symphony No 1 in C major op 21; 1. Adagio molto-Allegro con brio.flac 
  Bach
  Dvorak
 Popular     <--(Plex "Popular" Library - all non-classical - points here)
  Pop
   Michael Jackson
    Dangerous
     01 - trackname.flac
  Celtic
  New Age
  Various Artists

For ID3 tags, I used to use EasyTag, but it doesn’t handle all possible tags, so I recently started using Puddletag, which looks and operates very similarly to MP3Tag for Windows. I spent several months with EasyTag going through all my music (that’s only around 5300 tracks, small compared to some) to get the tags right. Now I only occasionally do things when I notice something I missed, or when I get new music.

When I acquire a new CD, I use Asunder to rip it. Asunder queries freedb.org to get artist name, genre, and track names. I correct any errors I see in Asunder before starting the rip. Purchases from Amazon I look at in Puddletag, but they’re usually already tagged in pretty good shape.

Then Puddletag to look at tags not exposed in Asunder (preparing for when Plex hopefully expands ID3 support) and make sure they are correct.

If I can’t find a decent-quality image of the CD cover, I’ll throw the CD cover on my scanner and make my own.

I use the OS’s file manager to move the folder (named for the album) under the Artist’s (or Composer’s) folder, then update the library in Plex.

I buy maybe 2 or 3 albums per year, so I don’t do this enough to warrant more automation than this.

how do you handle situations where you might have the same album multiple ways such as MP3 and FLAC versions of the same album?

I don’t. Well, I do, but only because I have to convert everything to MP3 for my car stereo. But the duplicates are not monitored by Plex. I can’t imagine why I would want Plex to care about that.