Yes, that’s the screen I described as Edit Music. I left library default for album sorting and did not check the box for Sonic Analysis.
Last night, I unchecked the box for Prefer Local Metadata. Plex immediately started scanning my music library. Here’s the good news: (1) Plex found the missing Ella Fitzgerald album sans my metadata; and (2) Plex did not screw up the order of the albums as it did six months or so ago. In other words, my Frank Sinatra albums are grouped under S for Sinatra rather than under F for Frank. However, my Harry Belafonte album is shown under H for Harry.
Here’s the bad news. Most of the problems I described previously remain. Some albums have my metadata. Others do not. On some albums, the tracks are blank when displayed on my TV. Fortunately, those blank tracks generally play music. On some albums, the artist’s name appears as the name of the track, at least on the TV. If this weren’t confusing enough, the Plex screens on my TV and computer are different even though both Plex apps are looking at the music files on my NAS, which is running the operative PMS. For example, when the tracks are blank on the TV, they sometimes have song titles on the computer. However, the song numbers generally begin with 0 rather than 1.
I’m not criticizing your work because I wouldn’t know how to start writing music software and because companies that have been selling music software for many years have bugs in their software. Audirvana still crashes from time to time.
Are you referring to the sample size/rate information you’re adding to the album name? In the case where it maintained it, you enclosed that information in parentheses; in the case where it didn’t, you used square brackets. For most of their scanners/agents, Plex intentionally ignores anything in square brackets, so that might explain the difference (though admittedly, I’m not sure if that’s the case for Plex Music). I’m not suggesting you change to using parentheses for all albums as that information isn’t really part of its name; I’m just pointing out the difference.
Here’s an exercise which might provide some useful information.
View your library by Artists, then filter by Unmatched. Is anything shown?
View your library by Albums, then filter by Unmatched. Is anything shown?
Are any of the problematic artists/albums show when you use the above steps? Is there any change in behavior if you match them (using match from menu when clicking the vertical ellipsis)?
Yes, by “metadata,” I am referring to the extra information I added to the various tracks and/or to the album title. I think your observation of my versus ( ) is incorrect. Please look closely at the song information in my library folders for the third and fourth albums and then look at Plex’s handling of that song information. All of the information I added to the Ella Fitzgerald album is gone, but all of the information I added to the Barbra Streisand album remains. In both cases, I used for the source of the song or other information and used ( ) for the recording date or release date.
I tried your suggested exercises and found unmatched albums and artists. Some of them were compilations. In any event, I didn’t notice a correlation between them and the problems I have been describing. Moreover, I hope Elan will be able to use the information I sent him.
I’m referring to the information in the album folder name.
Versus:
I wasn’t really looking at the track information (hence my question about sample size/rate at the album level). Now that you’ve pointed it out though, I don’t have any insight to offer as to why it would handle the tracks differently. Though you do have different information in parentheses for the albums (just the year for Streisand and a recording date for Fitzgerald).
At any rate, I hope you’re able to have Plex (the server and clients) display your music as you’d like.
Now I understand your point. Sorry. At one time, I was having an issue with Audirvana’s synching with my iTunes library, so I changed some of those titles from to ( ), or vice versa. After a while I got tired and missed some of them. This is one of the problems with trying to name files without having the specific rules for the music software handy.
I tried matching some of the unmatched albums. Unfortunately, Plex doesn’t find compound albums. By this, I mean when a single CD set includes two or more of the artist’s albums. I split a couple of mine apart, but I’m rapidly losing interest.
Edit: When I changed the parentheses to brackets on that album, I lost my metadata. Changing back to parentheses did not restore my metadata. Other albums have brackets at the end of the album title, and I still have my metadata.
You can’t change that setting and expect everything to fix itself. It’s a setting which applies to newly added music. So if specifying “Prefer Local Metadata” was a mistake, I’d recreate the music library from scratch.
After recreating the music library this morning, I ended up with what I had about a year ago. (1) With the sorting parameters set as Album by Album Artist, I have albums sorted using the artist’s first name rather than last name. For example, Barbra Streisand appears under B rather than S. It’s nice that Plex displays the artist’s name as First Name, Last Name, but that’s not the order I want for the albums themselves. Moreover, Plex is not consistent in this area. For example, Plex displays “Artie Shaw” as “Shaw, Artie” presumably because that is how the Artie Shaw folder is labeled in my library. In fact, all of my folders are labeled Last Name, First Name, except when I wasn’t certain what to do. For example, I labeled Bill Evans Trio as “Bill Evans Trio” rather than “Evans, Bill Trio.” I don’t know how to fix this problem except by correcting the information for 450 albums in my Plex library.
(2) Plex removed the metadata that I probably spent 1,000 hours researching and adding to the files. But Plex did not remove all of the metadata that I added. I can’t determine why it remains in some albums but disappeared from most of them. If I change all my music files (more than 7,000) to make Plex happy, Apple Music and Audirvana might not work as well as they do now.
I couldn’t be more pleased with the way Plex handles my film and TV libraries, but the music player just isn’t working for me. People have different needs and requirements, which might explain why music players range from pretty simple to very complicated.
