I tried to add a library for the music I’ve collected over decades. I was devastated to find that Plex demands that I tediously rename and reorganize over twenty thousand tracks to conform to its developers’ notion of how users should organize their music content. What a shame. All I would like is a library containing all of my tracks and the ability to sort them by either artist or title. Is there a reason for prohibiting users from adding files and folders that they have named and organized the way they want them?
[Mod-Edit: given this turned more into explaining different options of Plex, not so much discussing new features, I’ve moved this thread into a different section]
If you want to get the full value from Plex, Plex needs to be able to match your media. This requires certain rules or Plex cannot do that (imagine every user having their own schema – certainly for good reasons – and Plex having to guess what that structure might be).
There’s the option for Plex to use your data. This depends on the information to be embedded in the files (this can be done w/ certain apps like mp3tag). Even here you’ll need to stick to certain rules so Plex can recognize which items belong together (e.g. albums being derived based on the same album name and album artist).
If you don’t want all that you might still be able to organize your library using the Personal Media Artist agent. This will still look for embedded metadata (if there is any). This should otherwise go with the information it can derive from your folder / file names (if Plex can make any sense of them) and you can then display that library as Folders (=not using the organization of Plex).
Long story short… you can do that but this will chip away more and more features.
Conventions aren’t all bad (nor do they mean some weird notions Plex came up with to punish their users). If you want to use Plex to the full extent there’s always the option to use file renamers like FileBot to get this done.
If all you want is an app that displays your files and lets you play them you might be happier with a file manager or a more plain app that’s less focusing on managing your media.
@freonpsandoz - Just about every media player out there will look at the ID3 tag information embedded in music files, and display back to you that information… Winamp, VLC, even Windows Media Player, to name just a few.
This has been the case ever since MP3’s were around !! → I’ve been doing it for 20+ years, this is nothing new!
And so it’s not really such a stretch to think that Plex would also conform to using / expecting ID3 tag information.
All that aside, can you please post an example of the folder structure you are using, and what the results are in Plex after it scans them, just so we can see a little more about what is happening.
EDIT: After reading your last post and noticing you are using Foobar, I just checked and indeed it also reads the ID3 tag information and displays it back to you.
80s
Christmas
Classical
Comedy
Dylan
Foreign
Hawaiian
Jazz & Blues
Modern
Old
Pop & Hip-Hop
Reggae
Stones
Plex doesn’t seem to be using metadata in the files at all. The track view on the server shows all tracks, but the only artists it shows are “The Rolling Stones” and “Various Artists.” The list sorted by title appears to be correct. I’m not sure how to show all of the results I see in Plex.
My intended use for Plex is to access my media files remotely. It’s working well for movies and I just want to access music as well. Thanks.
OK, so from what you have shown, it would appear that your focus may be based on Genre.
Is it then the case that under each of your folders, say 80s, you have hundreds or even thousands of individual tracks, none of which are part of any album?
EDIT:
Could you please post a screenshot of your music library, but listed in “Artist” view, and then another listed in “Album” view.
Plex must be fully configured to prefer embedded tags. It’s not the default configuration, and your tags have to be very accurate. In my tests, once those conditions are met, Plex does a very good job with folders full of tracks from many albums.
Once Plex has identified all your music, it does just fine with track-oriented playback. There are at least two ways to do it.
You can tell Plex to display your library in Tracks mode, then Play them in order, or Shuffle:
All Plex needs to do is to allow a generic audio library in much the same way it has the home movie generic video library. So if you have home audio recordings, lectures, audio books, whatever that aren’t an album you can find on musicbrainz, you can put them in a library and they will go in based on the folder and names they have.
That link opens up a whole new set of capabilities that I didn’t know about. I’m experimenting with it now. That link should probably be the one that users are directed to when they search for how to organize music in Plex instead of the one that tells them to completely restructure how their files are stored on disk; what do you think?
UPDATE: I believe that I accurately followed the instructions in that link, with no success whatsoever. “The Rolling Stones” and “Various Artists” are the only two album artists shown for all tracks. Approximately 1/4 of the tracks show no artist. (Is there any way to mark multiple tracks and count them?) How do I troubleshoot this? Does Plex save a log that might help? How do I post screenshots? Is there a place where I can upload a problem track? Thanks.
Here’s a specific example of a track for which Plex shows the artist field blank and the incorrect album “Reggae Gold 2005.” (When I open the link to that album, the album art is neither that of the named album, nor the album in the track.) Here’s the mediainfo description of the track:
General
Complete name : D:\Mp3\Holding\Reggae\Bob Marley- Buffalo Soldier (Original 7'' Version).mp3
Format : MPEG Audio
File size : 4.97 MiB
Duration : 2 min 42 s
Overall bit rate mode : Variable
Overall bit rate : 247 kb/s
Album replay gain : -4.22 dB
Album replay gain peak : 1.010299
Album : Legend (The Best of Bob Marley & The Wailers)
Album/Performer : Bob Marley & The Wailers
Track name : Buffalo Soldier (Original 7'' Version)
Track name/Position : 5
Track name/Total : 14
Performer : Bob Marley & The Wailers
Encoded by : Freon P. Sandoz
Genre : Reggae
Recorded date : 1984
Writing library : LAME3.99r
Cover : Yes
Cover type : Cover (front)
Cover MIME : image/jpeg
Comment : Reduced hum at end
Audio
Format : MPEG Audio
Format version : Version 1
Format profile : Layer 3
Mode : Joint stereo
Duration : 2 min 42 s
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 247 kb/s
Minimum bit rate : 32.0 kb/s
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 kHz
Compression mode : Lossy
Replay gain : -4.17 dB
Replay gain peak : 0.989838
Stream size : 4.79 MiB (96%)
Writing library : LAME3.99r
Encoding settings : -m j -V 0 -q 3 -lowpass 19.5 --vbr-old -b 32
Here’s an ffprobe dump of the metadata:
Metadata:
album : Legend (The Best of Bob Marley & The Wailers)
artist : Bob Marley & The Wailers
album_artist : Bob Marley & The Wailers
comment : Reduced hum at end
encoded_by : Freon P. Sandoz
encoder : LAME 3.99 -V 0 --vbr-old
genre : Reggae
TLEN : 162582
title : Buffalo Soldier (Original 7'' Version)
track : 5/14
replaygain_track_peak: 0.989838
replaygain_album_gain: -4.22 dB
replaygain_album_peak: 1.010299
replaygain_track_gain: -4.17 dB
date : 1984
It’s entirely possible that Plex is using the root folder name (1 level above the MP3 file itself) as the album name and trying its best to guess from there.
I am not sure if Plex is going to let you do EXACTLY what you want to do, in EXACTLY the way you want to do it, and it might take some experimentation with a test library and differing folder structures to see how Plex reacts.
Ultimately, Plex really is expecting Albums and that is just the way it works, and unfortunately you might just have to accept that you are currently trying to do something that the product just doesn’t like.
So I would suggest trying the following to see how it behaves…
Create a new Test-Music library, and point it to a brand new location on your computer, with no content in it.
In Plex settings > Agents, make sure that “Local Media Assets” is at the top of the list as follows…
Artists:
Albums:
Check your test library settings…
This one you might have to play around with…
Now compile new folder somewhere with some MP3’s in it, and make them resemble an album, such as …
C:\MyPlexData\New-Test-Music-Library\Bob Marley And The Wailers - Legend The Best Of Bob Marley And The Wailers\
So basically the folder structure is this…
C:\MyPlexData
C:\MyPlexData\New-Test-Music-Library
C:\MyPlexData\New-Test-Music-Library\Artist Name - Album Name\
Then under there, you would have your MP3’s such as…
Bob Marley And The Wailers - 01 - Is This Love.mp3
Bob Marley And The Wailers - 02 - No Woman No Cry.mp3
Bob Marley And The Wailers - 03 - Could You Be Loved.mp3
Bob Marley And The Wailers - 04 - Three Little Birds.mp3
Bob Marley And The Wailers - 05 - Buffalo Soldier.mp3
All of this is based on this album…
or…
So long as the embedded ID3 tags are OK in those files, if this works, and Plex shows you a valid Album and Artist, then you will start to see how it behaves.
The only other idea I have is essentially to make your current folder structure mimic a “Various Artists” random album.
I did that with a folder full of random tracks that I had accumulated over the years.
I created a folder name called…
P:\Plex\Music\Various Tracks\
And edited the ID3 tag information for all the MP3’s in bulk, setting the album name to “Various Tracks”…
Ultimately, Plex really is expecting Albums and that is just the way it works, and unfortunately you might just have to accept that you are currently trying to do something that the product just doesn’t like.
Please read the title of this feature request. If what you recommend works, what would I do next? Do the same for all twenty thousand tracks?
Let’s curb down the temperature a bit.
Users are trying to help or guide you towards what they perceive to be a solution to the underlying problem.
As of today, Plex needs this structure and will organize your media according to (a) the structure / file naming or (b) embedded metadata. If you’re not particularly keen on displaying/accessing your music by artists or albums, you can e.g. display the library by Tracks.
Plex has gotten better at dealing with media dumped in one big folder – assuming the files have proper metadata.
After about 18 hours, Plex is still indicating “activity” with a moving circle around the up-arrow in the upper right. But nothing is displayed for any library. Instead, the text “Something went wrong / An unexpected error occurred.” is displayed.
Advice on how to reorganize my files is not a solution. It’s just a refinement of the instructions that Plex already gives users. If I thought I could cope with the folder structure recommended by Plex, I wouldn’t have posted the feature request in the first place; I would’ve looked for a tool or written a Perl script to reorganize my files. The one suggestion by beckfield on how to configure Plex to prefer metadata was a helpful one, but so far it hasn’t worked as documented. After letting it Plex re-scan the music library for 18 hours, I now get the error “Something went wrong / An unexpected error occurred” for all libraries.
Not trying to be an ass, but is there a reason that you can’t just have FileBot add albums to the files? You can still sort your Plex library by track and you avoid all of the frustration and yelling at everyone you are going through right now. Plex will match the whole library, and you will still get to listen to things however you want whether that be by track, album, artist, genre, etc.
Again truly just trying to understand why that can’t be done. Just trying to help.
