Alternative title: please make Plex stop making me cry
I don’t even know where to begin with this. I struggle with Plex on a daily basis. Here’s the problem: I try to add it to a standard Plex music library. Sometimes it seems like it gets EVERYTHING WRONG. I’ve already tried using a premium library, that was actually even worse.
I have a directory with 1 subdirectory for each album, each with the album name as title. Each album directory has sequentially numbered music files with each file properly tagged with album name, artist name, disc number, track number, track title, and album artist where applicable. Every album directory has a cover.jpg and background.jpg and each file is embedded with a downsampled 350x350px front cover image. It’s an incredibly logical, incredibly simple setup. By all accounts this should be exceptionally simply for Plex, but it’s just one problem after the other.
Half the time, the cover.jpg doesn’t show up properly. Sometimes it fixes itself if I set an Album Artist in the tags for the album’s files, but not always. Sometimes adding it results in a standard Plex image instead of the proper cover until I do another refresh metadata, at which point it suddenly does show up. But not always.
Some albums have tracks by different artists. Why does Plex frequently think the correct solution is to split the album up in up to 20 different albums of 1 track? Especially with my logical setup, it should be pretty obvious it’s a single album. Again, setting an Album Artist seems to do the trick, usually. But that REALLY shouldn’t be necessary.
Sometimes I have multi-disc albums where I have subfolders in the album folder named CD1 or Disc 1, etc. Sometimes that causes issues and causes artwork not to load. But not always. Sometimes moving all the folders to the main album folder and deleting the empty disc subdirectories solves that. But not always.
I don’t know how this is so hard for Plex. I could really use some help. Or rather, I could really use somebody who works on Plex to fix this stuff. I don’t even know how to describe it other than just tossing my frustrations out there and hoping somebody takes notice and can do something with it.
(Note: Please don’t tell me I can easily fix split albums in the Plex web client/etc. I don’t want to have to fix it. I want Plex to just do it right the first time. In theory I should be able to delete my library and recreate it from the same files and have everything show up correctly without having to adjust hundreds of entries by hand.)
