Plex and Music Media Management is Dead

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
46

jason, let me guess… foobar user ?

I think it is readily apparent that plex does not (and probably will not ever) support 2.4 tags.

I used mediamonkey to manage my music library, all of my tags should be 2.3 and I still have this problem (no track artist).

The majority of my music has already been tagged with musicbrainz picard.

Most of my compilations are tagged with a few different things that I have standardized (and not going to change just to satisfy plex);

  • the words Various Artists is never used. Only “Various” album artist is used for general compilations.
  • Soundtracks have an album artist of “Soundtracks”.
  • Techno/dance compilations have an album artist of “Techno”.
  • Other large collections are also grouped under an applicable album artist… for example time-life series of albums are all under album artist = “Time-Life”. VH-1 album are album artist = “VH-1”.

I will not be retagging 200k+ tracks just to please plex.

1 Like
48

Tell me more:
What kind of files? What is the value of “Album Artists” for these tracks? What is the folder structure for this album?

49

Here is an example of a sampler album. You can see both the necessary meta tags and the folder path of each track.

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7fe07538eb5469444238f0fe6301b2d49928024e.png1707×768 87.1 KB

50

Doing a fresh test:

image

51

Wrong scanner and agent
Put both on ‘Plex Music’

53

I use to do that too but with “Singles” since there are more than 1. :grinning: Then ran into OMD’s album Singles. I’ve since switched to naming the album for singles as the name of the song.

55

many of my true singles are what MBZ calls [non-album tracks], which is what the album tag may contain.

others, the album tag (and album artist, and track#) are blank, because they are NULL.

stuff that are “EP’s” or “Singles” as a release with accompanying b-side/extras/remixes, are also tagged with that that ‘album’ name.

example
https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/68c111d4-3bae-3e90-b48a-fa8c1f008802
might be tagged with album tag = “SOS / Man In the Middle (blue label) [single]”

57

I do not want or care if plex matches that ‘album’, I just want it to respect the tags that are already there.

and it does not, even with prefer local metadata ENABLED and all the other stuff disabled.

59

yeah well at this point, it might come to that, and I suspect I’m not the only one who feels that way.

plex may get away with ‘plex way or the highway’ filenaming/organization when it comes to video, due lack of standardized tagging.

audio is not the same. requiring specific tags or paths is ridiculous when every other music app can function without that kind of requirements.

2 Likes
60

What tag version?

61

Thanks. But why?

64

I think this is a core issue for many. I’m going to try rolling back ID3 tag version to test difference.

65

music has, appears will continue to be the weakest part of plex, simply due to the sheer rigidity of it.

music, the red-headed-stepchild of plex.

1 Like
66

Because you want the new, working code and not the old, now defunct code.

68

I only wish I could get it to work as they insist it does work. Hopefully we can shake out a specific cause or two of the problems. I think the ID tag version is something important here, and should be documented (i’m working on confirming the behavior).

69

Although I’ve been advised not to use v2.4, at least 2/3 of my library uses that format. Plex seems to read the tags for track artist, artist, genre, and even release date amongst others. I can change any of those tags, refresh metadata on an album, and it’s reflected in Plex.

I’m guessing Plex utilizes some form of ffmpeg’s ffprobe, which as far as I can tell, reads the tags properly.

70

Out of curiosity what does MusicBrainz Picard show for your compilations? Does it organize it properly? They are the best standardized tagging platform and Plex as far as I know uses that.

I actually curate all my music via Picard, all 60K+ songs are properly tagged etc. etc. and I have always “used local tags” and now i am interested to see how well Plex matches up to my local content. Creating a new library now :slight_smile:

71

Plex doesn’t use Picard.
It uses Musicbrainz. (i.e. the database), but combines it with more data from other services like allmusic, last.fm and fanart.tv

72

I did overlook this (Adding Music Media From Folders) doc but it doesn’t mention compilations at all.

73

To sum up so far, this has been the most informative piece if info I’ve received today.

Using an ID3 tag version of 2.3 doesn’t fix things for comps in and of itself. I’m now testing whether that in combo with “Various Artists” in the Album Artist field will do it.

1 Like