New Music Library Settings

[noapology]

Server Version#: Version 3.69.1
Players: Latest versions of Plex for Roku, and Android, as well as web client.

I will be creating a new Music Library within PMS. Before I do, I would like to make sure I am using the optimal settings for the library and the album and artist agents best suited to my music collection. I have read the relevant Support Articles, but have also seen message threads where users seem to be having continued problems despite following these articles.

Been a Plex user for years. Music library had always been a little messy due to metadata and organization issues on my part. Recently, I went through I cleaned up the entire collection.

Folder tree structure is the recommended:

[Drive Letter:]
/Music
/Artist
/Album
/Track Number - song title.mp3

• All files are mp3 format.
• All files contain the following metadata: Track Number (with leading zero), Song Title, Album Title, Artist, Album Artist, Year, Genre (one only).
• All files contain embedded copy of the album’s corresponding folder.jpg file.
• All album folders contain a corresponding folder.jpg file.

Here is what I would like to see within PMS:

• All metadata displayed to be pulled from metadata tags.
• All album art within PMS to be the folder.jpg for each album.
• All artist posters to be pulled from whatever source is most recommended.

I will be creating a new library, because despite the extensive clean up of my collection, my existing library in PMS is still a mess, with missing album art and, in fewer cases, artist posters.

I am a Plex Pass member, and would like to create a Premium Music Library and a standard Music Library so I can compare the results.

Your time and advice are appreciated. Thank you.

[OttoKerner]

Before creating the library:

Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - Premium Music
pull the line ‘Local Media Assets’ into the topmost position
repeat the same under
Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - last.fm

During the creation of the library, go to the ‘Advanced’ tab and check ‘Use embedded metatags’.

Verify that your ‘Album Artist’ tags contain identical content for all tracks of an album.
The ‘disc number’ does not belong into the ‘Album Title’ metatag.

Verify your multi-disc albums:

Organizing Music - Soundtracks and Various Artists (Hit collections)

I am going to do a bit of copy/paste of posts I did in the Plex Pass only forums: ===== 1.“Various Artists” is the usual choice for ‘Sampler’ style albums. There may be exceptions for ‘collaboration’ albums which are credited to all participating artists on the album cover. 2. use the title of the single as it appears on the cover. You can augment that information with (CDM) or (single) or (Maxi) or (EP) as it fits. If it is a genuine release, Gracenote should have no problem identifying it. …

handling singles and EP’s

Best way to add album, singles & ep to a Premium Music Library

conventional CD release If we are talking about a conventional CD single release (where there is still more than one song contained), the tagging is not different from an album. AlbumArtist: “Depeche Mode” Album: “Blasphemous Rumours (CDS CDBONG7)” Artist: “Depeche Mode” DiscNo: “1” Of course you don’t need to include the full catalog number like I did in the example. It is just there to show you that it is possible. But you might still wanna include (CDS) into the album title, just to ind…

possible ‘side car’ files for music

Music Album artwork

Little tip: If you have lots of bootlegs etc. you want to bring your embedded metatags into order first. Then you need to have the Local Media Assets agent in top position. I wouldn’t trust last.fm to fetch correct info about bootlegs and special editions of albums, like those recent expanded re-releases of Zappa albums. Put as much info into the meta tags as possible. Put a cover art inside the album folder and you should be good. Makes sure to set at least ‘AlbumArtist’ and ‘AlbumTitle’ to…

soundtracks and ‘various artists’

Plex Folder View - folder.jpg not recognized?

@naddel81 said: album view does not work properly, because if you have various artists on an album (most cases) then it shows them as “various artists” instead of the album name. folder view would be the best option and I guess it has been asked before. is it too hard to implement? You can put what you like into the AlbumArtist meta tag, if you don’t like it to appear under VA. You could use the game title or the game developer or the game ‘universe’ (if you have several albums which fit in…

[noapology]

Thank you for such a thorough reply. My collection and the metadata have been thoroughly groomed.

I am running into an issue with album art. The album metadata displays accurately, but no art displays. When I select to edit the album, and head to the poster selection screen, the selected item is blank, and the art pulled from the folder.jpg file is there but not selected. This is the case for a little more than half of my collection in the new library.

I have emptied the trash, optimized the database, cleaned bundles, and restarted PMS. Simply grasping at straws at this point. While it’s true that I can manually select the art for each album where this problem occurs, that largely defeats the purpose of this whole project.

Thank you.

[OttoKerner]

Is your internet connection a bit unreliable?
Which type of Anti Virus software or personal firewall are you using?
Did the server have uninterrupted internet connectivity while it scanned through your music files?
Make sure that all other activity in the server has finished: What happens if you ‘Refresh Metadata’ on one Album Artist?

[noapology]

Is your internet connection a bit unreliable? Very reliable.
Which type of Anti Virus software or personal firewall are you using? The PMS is behind a PiHole and an OpenWRT firewall. I am certain that this is not the issue.
Did the server have uninterrupted internet connectivity while it scanned through your music files? Yes.
Make sure that all other activity in the server has finished: What happens if you ‘Refresh Metadata’ on one Album Artist? No change.

For albums my desire is that PMS should be pulling absolutely nothing but the folder.jpg, and the embedded metadata within each file.

Thank you for your reply.

[OttoKerner]

First perform this procedure: https://support.plex.tv/articles/202967376-clearing-plugin-channel-agent-http-caches/

Then

1. activate debug logging (not ‘verbose’!)
2. quit Plex Server
3. wait 1 minute
4. start Plex Server
5. wait 2 minutes
6. refresh one artist or add one album into your library
7. wait 10 minutes
8. fetch log files and attach them here

[noapology]

Apologies for the extreme delay in my reply to this thread. Some personal matters took priority…

I’d like to resume trying to figure out why Plex is incorrectly handling both metadata and album art in any Plex Music library I create. In order to simplify this I created a new library consisting of one artist with four albums.

Folder structure, file naming format, tags, and album art are all in accordance with the recommendations.

With all four albums, additional album art was downloaded from non-local agents, and this art was displayed instead of the local art (which is both embedded in each mp3 file, and stored in the album folder as “folder.jpg”)

In three of the four albums, the dates were not displayed despite the dates being in the metadata of each file.

Here you can see the three different album covers Plex acquired for one of the albums.

Here you can see the tags for the first track off the album.

Hitting “refresh metadata” fixed the issue with the dates, and in three of the four albums also selected the correct album art.

At this point I downloaded the logs which are attached here for your reference.

Plex Media Server Logs_2019-02-16_09-56-32.zip (570.9 KB)

Why is non-local album art being downloaded in the first place? Can this be avoided?

As mentioned in my initial post, what I would like is:

• A Premium Library
• All metadata displayed to be pulled from metadata tags, and that all applicable metadata tags are displayed.
• All album art within PMS to be taken from the folder.jpg that is embedded or stored in the corresponding album’s folder. (In my case, I have the same copy of folder.jpg in the folder and embedded).
• No additional album art is downloaded by Plex. (There is absolutely no need for this.)

Thank you for your time.

[OttoKerner]

@noapology

what I would like is:

• A Premium Library
• No additional album art is downloaded by Plex. (There is absolutely no need for this.)

These two points cancel each other out. You cannot disable external metadata and cover art in a premium library.
This is only possible in a regular library with the Personal Media Artists agent. But doing so will also disable all Premium features and the new ‘radios’.

@noapology

All metadata displayed to be pulled from metadata tags, and that all applicable metadata tags are displayed.

Plex pulls only a few meta tags from your files. On top of that, which meta tags it pulls depends also on the file format. I know that it cannot read a date from mp3 files. That only works with flac.
All you can do is defining the priority of the meta data sources. With ‘Local Media Assets’ on the top, Plex should use the embedded meta data preferably – if it is able to read them.

@noapology

All album art within PMS to be taken from the folder.jpg that is embedded or stored in the corresponding album’s folder. (In my case, I have the same copy of folder.jpg in the folder and embedded).

Again, that is not possible in a Premium library.
You can only define a priority for local album art.

However, I have another idea about that:
Check the album folder for hidden graphics files. Other media players (most infamously Windows Media Player use to write very small versions of the album art into the folders.)
Often unbeknownst to the user, because those files are flagged as ‘hidden’ and sometimes even as ‘system’, which means they don’t show up in a file manager even if you enable the display of ‘hidden’ files.
It can’t hurt to check for those files. They are often named smallthumb.jpg or similar.
Do also check the folders in the hierarchy above the album folder for this kind of files.

[noapology]

Thank you for the reply.

@OttoKerner

Plex pulls only a few meta tags from your files.

Thanks. I should have chosen more words more carefully. It’s not that I want Plex to display tags it doesn’t support. What I would like is for Plex, when displaying tags it does support, to display the tags I have embedded. Despite my settings being correct, it does not always do this, instead displaying tags fetched from an agent.

@OttoKerner

You can only define a priority for local album art.

I have defined the priority for local album art, and I have provided local album art. Yet Plex very often prioritizes agent art instead, and there seems to be no rhyme nor reason to what it does and when it does not.

Are there developer-intended reasons that Plex would not prioritize local art when the user has set it to do so? There seem to be numerous threads on this board about this issue, but it remains unclear to me if this is by design or not.

@OttoKerner

Check the album folder for hidden graphics files.

This is a great suggestion, particularly for those of us on Windows. It is something I spent some time taking care of (including the thumbs.db files) prior to creating this new library.

I have another thread over here going into more detail about the specific art and metadata issues I am seeing:

https://forums.plex.tv/t/metadata-album-art-problems-with-logs/379276

[OttoKerner]

@noapology

Are there developer-intended reasons that Plex would not prioritize local art when the user has set it to do so? There seem to be numerous threads on this board about this issue, but it remains unclear to me if this is by design or not.

No, not that I know of. It is clearly a bug. But it is very difficult to reproduce (and thus, to fix), because it only happens with some albums.

[noapology]

@OttoKerner

But it is very difficult to reproduce (and thus, to fix), because it only happens with some albums.

For what it’s worth to those attempting to troubleshoot, I provided quite a bit of detail in my other thread, focusing on a handful of artists and albums with definite problems. Included is the fact that disabling IPv6, while not a total fix, dramatically reduced the number of art and metadata issues I was having.

And now I’m onto troubleshooting my “There are no playable items” error when attempting to play Radios.

• I currently have two libraries. My main library. Then a second, which has all of the same settings as the main, but with fewer artists and albums – purely for testing purposes.
• In the test library, I am able to play Library Radio, Time Travel Radio, and Random Album Radio.
• In the main library, I am able to play Random Album Radio, but Library and Time Travel Radios get the error, as do all artist radios I have so far attempted to play.
• “Download Popular Track Information” is checked, and all other settings for both Premium Libraries are the same.

Here are some fresh logs of successful and unsuccessful attempts at playing Radios:
Plex Media (124.8 KB)

Any suggestions?

Thanks for your time and knowledge. I really appreciate it.