New “Plex Music” library has an advanced setting for Album Art = Plex, Local or Plex+Local, but this does not apply for Artist Art. Although I have a folder.jpg for every artist, Plex is grabbing as many as 11 additional images for each artist! that don’t get used. Can the Album Art option be Album/Artist Art or add a separate option for Artist Art, to prevent this behaviour.
I just checked and it is eating away at disk space. The small partition I use for Plex Media Server files that was half full before, looks in danger of running out before I finish the full library recreation currently underway. I know I could use a “Personal Media Artists” library but I want the ‘popular tracks’ + ‘similar artists’ data Plex Music provides.
Update: I realised that the Plex Music agent is actually ignoring the local folder.jpg I use for compilation album artists. I read that there is some assumption by Plex that ‘album artist’ will be named ‘various artists’, to denote compilation albums, which is simply NOT the case? There is a metadata flag that should be set for compilation album tracks to denote this. I use “comp Elec”, “comp Pop”, “comp Alt” etc as the album artist for compilation albums so they are grouped according to music style. I have had to return to using “personal media agents” for my compilation albums library, and may have to revert all other libraries and forgo the extras of the new “Plex Music” agent as there are just too many downsides to using it. I only actually want the ‘popular tracks’ and ‘similar artists’ metadata added as the rest is all correctly set offline already.
Maybe I would be better working out another way to grab that separately and inject it? It’s a shame we can’t just create & customise our own scanners (or primary agents) using any of the other agents, similar to how you can in Settings->Agents but with finer control (agents subdivided more). Then we could build:-
MyMusicScanner1 = file-tags + local album-art + local artist-art + LastFM-genres + Plex Artist-Info + Plex Album-Info + Plex Popular-Tracks + Plex Similar-Artists + Plex Concert-Info etc
where it runs through them in order grabbing what we want and filling in any blanks with later ones. These options could all then be removed from the advanced tab on library edit leaving just agent to be selected as you could create any variations as a new agent, though you would probably only use one per library type anyway!
Maybe a Dev can advise if this is already possible by creating a custom scanner that includes all agents? I notice it is not currently possible to edit the sequencing of “Plex Music” agents is this an oversight or deliberate?
OK, I’ve written (cloned most of it) an agent for artist.nfo & album.nfo = all working and another one that clones PlexMusic but with just the bits I want, to which I’ll add settings.
This one enables using artist.nfo + album.nfo files for music using Personal Media Artists agent. Copy KodiMusicNfo.bundle to \Plex Media Server\Plug-ins folder.
folder.jpg seems to get picked up fine by Plex as is.
It’s been a standard for ever, and is used in Kodi and many tagging programs.
My structure is:-
library\albumartist\year.album\disk.track. trackartist - songtitle.mp3
OK here’s the other one. I had to mod the existing agent to get it to work with Plex Music as regular Plugins wouldn’t work (see readme.md for instructions). This enables using the new ‘Plex Music’ agent in latest beta + .nfo files together.
I wrote my own program to handle everything to do with this years ago, it’s not practical to release publicly at moment though, maybe one day, sorry. But obviously using kodi itself is the easiest way, just export the music library or there are third party apps. For me offline metadata is king, set it once, then forget + easily tweak-able in xml files.
I only actually want the favourite tracks + similar artists from PlexMusic. At some point I will grab favourite tracks from album.nfo’s + add similar artists as tags in artist.nfo, then won’t need to go online at all for any metadata, which is really inefficient and slow.
