Yes, I agree with you completely!
Meanwhile; what I did for my music collection was first cleaning all META data by hand using Puddletag and then I imported everything bit by bit. Took me a maybe 200 hours but now it's fine. My collection consists of around 600 artists and all of them are 'commercial' or at least were that at some point in time.
Also usefull is the tool Headphones, I drop my music in the 'downloaded' folder and it only adds it to my collection after it matches and tags the music.
Maybe you should start a Kickstarter campaing to create the mothership of media management tools :P
Unfortunately, as much as I want Plex to work, I'm not able (or willing) to put 200 hrs. into a piece of malfunctioning software just to catalog my music collection. I did spend an entire day (my day off) trying to make things work, but to no avail. It was pretty irritating to have spent my whole day off in such a manner, but made me decide that I'd rather abandon this project if it's going to cause this kind of grieve. One of the problems is if you go to Musicbrainz or Last.fm, they have conflicting information at times. As an example, I was trying to match the album "Full House Live" by The J. Geils Band. On one site it has it listed as what I noted, and the other it's listed as "Live Full House". Sometimes it may be listed as Full House "Live" (notice quotations around Live. All of these matters lead to incorrect matches. Of course there's also the problem with one site referring to the Artist name as J. Geils Band, or The J. Geils Band which also messes searches up. At Last.fm, for some titles they don't even have them numbered by track, so what you come up with is the track names but no numbering. For others they do. Sad. Really doesn't help when there isn't a consensus on what the real title is. I've found that Wikipedia had better information overall than either of the two sources I've mentioned or even AllMusic. Not sure if there's a metadata plugin for either, but I haven't found one. But I can say that I think there are much better options out there for matching metadata than those currently used by Plex. I've scoured the Internet for solutions and have read all the instructions on Plex. The sad reality is that it doesn't work as advertised. I've seen a lot of people that know Python making their own scripts (which they really shouldn't have to) but I don't know Python and don't have the time to learn it either. How I would like to see Plex work is to just refer to my ID3 tags I have for my music library and use that. If I wanted a background photo I'd have to look for that elsewhere. Yes, I've read many posts that say to use your local media files instead of one of the metadata sites, but this still doesn't seem to work. Seems this should be a pretty simple thing for Plex to make work, but it just doesn't. Also it seems it should be a simple option to delete something from your library if Plex totally messes it up (or the metadata sites), but I haven't found a way of doing so. I'm also still at a loss of what the difference is between Local Media Assets and the Personal Media metadata agent. Believe me, I've tried everything to try to get my music information to match correctly ad nauseam. Refresh, Update Library, Force Refresh, changing different metadata sites, etc. One strange thing I've found is when I try to scan my whole library to update the metadata using Last.fm, it won't work correctly, but if I go into each Artist and do it for each it may work. ????? Kind of a long process when you have an extensive library. This is in no way a comprehensive list of problems I've run into with my music library, and can't understand how Plex seems to work so well with movies, but is severely lacking with other media types. I haven't even tried my TV Series library yet, but I'm sure that will be a headache.
I'm currently using Tag&Rename as my program for matching up my ID3 tags for my music library, and it seems to have done me well for some time until I started trying to use Plex. I've been looking for better programs to clean up my tags, but given the disparities between the different metadata sites Plex uses, it doesn't seem it would do any good no matter how well my tags were organized. As mentioned, would love to see more metadata plugins for more reliable sites, and would try to make my own if I knew Python.
May give it one more chance and really start from scratch reading the complete Plex support page, but I think I've read it thoroughly enough to have set things up properly. Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated, as from what I've seen as far as how Plex handles Movie libraries, it would be a wonderful application if it worked as well in other areas. It's been out long enough I can't understand why some of these issues haven't been ironed out. I would even love to pay for the service if it worked as it should, but for the time being I can't see why I would.
Also still don’t understand all the files that had built up on my computer while using Plex, even after having uninstalled it. Never would have known they were even there if I wasn't so OCD about finding junk after uninstalls on Windows as I've learned long ago that just because you uninstall a program, more times than not there will still be a multitude of junk files hanging out there. There were literally gigs of files left over. I don't plan to spend endless hours trying to figure out how to make Plex work as I would like, but will probably give it one more shot. Like I've said in my prior post, I know that XBMC is not the answer, as there were always too many bugs and plugins that flat out just didn't work to the point it was pretty much useless.
:wub:
