I’m super excited about this update. I’ve been checking for forum daily for weeks. I’ll wait for the stable version to be released (cuz I’ve been bit by beta bugs before). But I have some questions as to how the metadata is handled.
It sounds like Plex really wants you to use their new MusicBrainz data agent. But having a music degree, and being in the education business, means I have already curated my music library into non-existent sub genres. Or at the very least more specific genres that are often mislabeled, for example Big Band music is always under Jazz.
Similarly, often these jazz artists are listed under several names. A quick search shows Buddy Rich, Buddy Rich Big Band, Buddy Rich & his Orchestra, The Buddy Rich Band, etc. Of course I want these all listed under one artist.
Will any of these issues be affected, either good or bad, by the update?
I read under Prefer local metadata:
Importantly, if this option is enabled, then it basically means that you’re promising that not only is your entire music library tagged, but also that it’s tagged correctly . You’ll also potentially be missing out on future musical enhancements that rely on new and even richer metadata information coming from online sources.
I’d really like those future musical enhancements, but I also like to curate my library.
Right now, I use iTunes as my main music manager (mostly as I need playlist folders), and I edit the artist and genre labels before importing. I imagine Plex does not edit the embedded metadata, as it does not currently.
I can tell you what happens in my (previously ‘premium’ library).
I have the ‘prefer local metadata’ enabled, and refreshed a few artists now, and plex does appear to honor the tags while still providing artist info and album art where applicable, along with related artists and such.
In the edit music library advanced, there are several new options which you can choose to prefer local or plex metadata.
genre is one of the options to use local metadata.
there does not appear to be any playlist functionality changes, so if you rely heavily on playlists, then you might (continue to) find plex playlist support, lacking.
It sounds like I should continue to edit the metadata (Album Artist/Genre) outside of Plex, but that Plex will fill in extra around that. That’s fine. Again, I like to curate. I imagine it’s how I’ll spend my retirement years (though I’m years away).
It sounds like Plex will now recognize multiple artist per track. Which is great, as I want to add soloists to these tracks, which is not often on the usual databases.
I had thought I read that in the support doc, but I guess not. Darn. I also saw it still does not have composer data. Not a huge loss for me, but still it would’ve been nice to have.
@OttoKerner – My old premium library is still downloading metadata, but when it’s done, there are several Artist Bios that I had edited and locked. The new metadata agent is respecting those locks (a good thing) but I would like to be able to at least see what info is there as an alternative.
In most cases, the only reason I edited the bio was because it was something like “There are at least 3 artists with the name…” or it displayed the HTML escape code “&” for characters like “&” etc, it it made it difficult to read. Sometimes it was also necessary to edit the “Related Artists” becaue of the wrong bio, so that field would be locked too.
I obviously can’t remember which artists I had to change, so is there I way for me to find out which artists have locked bios and other fields, so that I can unlock them and refresh the metadata?
No way to preview those data inside Plex.
You can see if the artist in question has a bio and/or album reviews on allmusic.com
As long as musicbrainz.org has a link to allmusic.com for that artist, the reviews should land in your library.
If there is no artist bio on allmusic or the link is missing, Plex is falling back to last.fm artist bios.
I guess I didn’t explain my situation clearly. I realized I could look up the info, and understood that Plex can’t give me a preview.
But since I don’t know which artists I have locked, it would mean going thru the whole library manually to look for the “locked” icon. I was hoping some method to sort out the locked items, and unlock them, so they can benefit from the new metadata
Ahh, gotcha. There unfortunately no way to do that in the GUI.
But of course you can edit your database directly and remove those locks on all items in one sweep.
If you have access to the curl command or have an equivalent way of sending commands per http to your server, here is a sequence of commands to unlock them all.
First you need to determine the library ID of your music library.
You can get it from the Plex XML info of one of the music tracks (or by simply hovering the mouse cursor over the library name of your music library in the web app)
Then you build yourself some queries:
(These will unlock artist bios, album summaries and the genres of both artists and albums. There may be additional fields which could be locked, but I’d have to investigate further how these are addressed per the API.)
curl -X PUT "me.local:32400/library/sections/NN/all?type=8&summary.locked=0&X-Plex-Token=XXXXX"
curl -X PUT "me.local:32400/library/sections/NN/all?type=9&summary.locked=0&X-Plex-Token=XXXXX"
curl -X PUT "me.local:32400/library/sections/NN/all?type=8&genre.locked=0&X-Plex-Token=XXXXX"
curl -X PUT "me.local:32400/library/sections/NN/all?type=9&genre.locked=0&X-Plex-Token=XXXXX"
replace me.local by the IP address or the domain name of your Plex server
replace NN by the library ID of your music library
replace XXXXX with your X-Plex-Token
There is also a Windows version of curl available.
Thanks – I’ll look into it when I get the chance, and work up the courage to dabble with the database. I’ll do it, just to prove I can, but sometimes I’m a little hesitant
@OttoKerner, I took your advice and installed the (then) beta on a VM. I copied my music library to a different hard drive and had it set to not use local or embedded tags. I was curious to see what would happen.
1.18.X (BETA) - No Local/embedded
Tracks - 12077
Albums - 1240
Artists - 661
I didn’t dig too deep, but there were some weird albums combined. I’m guessing possibly in musicals or various artists/unknown. Also *Nsync became InSync and it took a couple refreshes of the album to correct that. As far as I can tell it is tagged/stored correctly (but they’re my wife’s).
I did finally upgrade to the stable version and apparently lost more Artists but not as many albums.
I’m not worried about it, just thought it was interesting. This update isn’t enough to make Plex my main music player (I need multiple track artists and playlist folders), but it is certainly a welcome addition.
I was excited to see thread, but unfortunately not getting the results discussed above. Specifically, many of the genres embedded in my tracks are missing from the filter list. If I am interpreting the functionality discussion correct, track genre data are not be read correctly. EDIT: On second thought, the track data are being read because I see the info in the Tags: Genre. The Filter mechanism is not adding all of these genres to it’s list…
My settings are: Prefer local metadata; Genres: embedded tags; scanner: Plex Music; Agent: Plex Music.
