Hi All - I’m new to Plex and I’m having problems with compilations - it keeps grabbing an artist name from who knows where and renames a load of albums with this artist? When I investigated further it seems it found an artist on one compilation album that had several tracks and now thinks all compilations should have that album artist! I select the albums, change the album artist name to ‘Various Artists’ which seems to work for a while. but then I notice it has changed them all back to ‘Prince Far I’ randomly and for some reason I can’t fathom.
These files are perfectly understandable from the album folder name and the track name, but maybe because a lot of them are older ALAC files ripped with iTunes maybe they don’t have tags? But then it seems the only way to get this software to read my tags is to take an album out of the folder structure and put it in again - I don’t really fancy doing this for 100’s of albums!
I have set the various selections to prefer my metadata but it seems to ignore this when I refresh.
Should I give up and go back to Roon, or am I just coming across a known glitch?
I am not a music metadata expert, there are more qualified people on the forums for that. But what stands out to me is it auto-filling the “Album Artist” tag automatically. I suspect that might happen if your own metadata does not actually contain the “Album Artist” metadata flag already.
Well I’m not sure, I have so many files that go so far back and some of them are from iTunes - but what’s crazy is the folder structure clearly says ‘Various Artists/Album Name/tracks’ but its not looking at that obviously and coming up with its own ideas… one thing I am learning not to do is ‘refresh metadata’ that’s can mess things up completely!!
Multi-disc albums seem also to be a bit of an issue, some it finds ok, others not, when merged the tracks end up all over the place (and some of them have tags with disc number in!). So I took out a set of discs in separate folders for each disc, ran them through MP3Tag and it properly numbered them with the correct disc number, and I then copied them to the server into one folder… that’s seemed to work fine.
I think the lesson here is Plex is not Roon, it needs everything to be squeaky clean and how it likes it… I’ve only got 500 or so albums as I mostly stream now, but the thought of tagging all those and trusting some software not to mess up and fills me with dread!
Yeah, Plex is way too much of a stickler for metadata. Mine was all over the place, because the way I’d play music is just dump my “Misc” folder into Winamp and let it shuffle.
I had to cleanse my metadata, and start doing albums and stuff. Sucks. Half of my music files now are files I’d never play, but Plex acts all offended if I do not give it complete albums, or even make up my own albums.
Then there is something wrong with your approach/the files.
If you have enabled “prefer local metatags” in the properties of your music library, both your folder structure and the embedded meta tags in your files must be immaculate.
Well if I don’t ‘Prefer local metadata’ most of my albums in Plex have no genre, and that at least I know is in all files. Plex is flaky, no that’s not the right word - ‘pedantic’ - that’s the word. Also it is a little unusual in its treatment of metadata (where it gets what from and why) . It doesn’t seem to look at folder structures or names, preferring to examine the tracks and find its information external to the files system - even if you do engage ‘Prefer local metadata’.
The thing is, I know it won’t import ‘styles’ tags and it does usually find loads of those on the internet wherever it gets them from,. So I do want to allow it to do what it does well, I’m just working out what doesn’t do well and how to circumvent that.
No problem, I’m new to its foibles and it’s free (mustn’t forget that) and there are things it does that Roon doesn’t do - deep dive for example is terrific fun. Would be more fun if volume normalisation worked but perhaps it hasn’t analysed all my files yet.
All very new to me so far, but I wanted to let Roon go because I just wasn’t using it, I find Qobuz really good now for metadata and reviews and artist bios so Roon sort of didn’t have a resin to be.
**“**Volume normalization for music in Plex—specifically Loudness Leveling which functions similarly to ReplayGain—is no longer exclusive to Plex Pass when using the Plexamp app. While previously a premium feature, Plexamp is now free for all users and includes loudness leveling in its base functionality.”
“However, the system Plex uses is different from traditional ReplayGain metadata tags.” Well of course it would be…
The only way to make Plex happy with your music library is to follow all the rules to the letter. It is downright neurotic.
Make sure EVERYTHING has Artist and Album Artist filled out, and Album Artist can only be ONE artist name. Artist can use multiple names with a null separator.
Make sure every VA artist has Album Artist set to “Various Artists,” no typos, no variations.
If you have collections of tracks that are not “real” albums organize them with a fake Album Artist and fake album name. For example all my random DJ mixes have AA = “DJ Mixes” with album names like “Old Rave Mixes.” Plex will hate this since it cannot look up metadata, but it also won’t damage the rest of your library.
And of course, make sure the folder structure is flawless.
From what I have seen, when you see these misnamed albums, the root problem may be in other albums than the ones you see screwed up. So check everything. The whole library. Get to know a tool like mp3tag, it makes it tolerable. It can even write out new folder structure from tags.
When you are doing this and checking your progress I recommend DELETING the music library in Plex instead of making changes and rescanning. TURN OFF all the time consuming stuff like looking up tour dates until you are done and everything looks right.
A screwed up music library be fixed!. It happened to me, I did the hard work of checking EVERYTHING, and stuck to a tagging system thereafter, and have had no relapses despite having a huge library.
Yes I’m discovering that! Plex just renamed every ‘Various Artist’ artist for every compilation album I had careful updated as ‘Various Artists’ (in Plex!) to “Lightnin’ Hopkins, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Big Joe Williams”!!! Dozens of them I hadn’t noticed it rename when I did a rescan - I now presume this was because, out of all the compilations albums I have, that’s the only one I hadn’t changed to ‘Various Artists’?
Also - now I realise if I see a glitch in Plex, don’t use Plex to alter its metadata, go check out the Album Artist/Track Artist in the folder itself and alter that… and check tags whilst you are at it!
I suppose it makes sense to have a squeaky clean folder system, consistent file naming and tags all in a row anyway… for when the next music library player software drops (I’m still searching for something that has a great GUI and can handle classical music tags)!!
I think I’ll spend some time looking for the ideal structure for Plex, which will also be perfect for whatever I point at my Music drive…
Talking of volume normalisation, sound levelling or whatever you fancy calling it, Plex is doing its stuff, its my high end Lumin streamer insists on a bit perfect stream, so Plex doesn’t mess with the file at all. Lumin is just about the only streamer that actually implements a Plex endpoint I recently discovered, which is handy. My WiiM in the headphone set-up I discovered can only use its own app to cast Plex, you can’t see the WiiM as a an endpoint from PlexAmp.
I have several Raspberry Pi 4’s hanging around since I invested in proper streamers, apparently Ai tells me I could stream Plex to one of those with sound levelling - you live and learn…
That doesn’t sound technical. What does “insisting” mean? Either the player can actually play what is served to it, or it cannot.
Whether the audio data are unchanged or not, is solely in the player’s domain.
It’s the player’s responsibility to either use the loudness data or not. The server doesn’t apply the volume.
You are very abrupt Otto, could you refrain from answering my posts please as you have been mistaken before in your reply and I really don’t like your attitude… I’ll leave it to Google Ai to answer your comment.
Technical Explanation:
Device-Side Limitation: When you “cast” to a Lumin device, the Lumin hardware itself takes over the role of the player. Lumin’s implementation of the Plex client does not currently include Plexamp-specific features like Loudness Levelling, Sweet Fades, or the Equaliser.
Processing Location: Loudness levelling in Plexamp is performed locally on the playback device (your phone or computer). When casting, the “brain” of the operation shifts to the Lumin, which lacks the necessary software to apply Plex’s specific loudness data to the stream.
