Plex Folder View - folder.jpg not recognized?

General Discussions
1

Hi there,

I have a lot of game soundtracks that are organized in folders and are not found by any scanner/agent.
So I thought I get a folder.jpg in every sub-folder (album) and plex could view it as the explorer in windows does (showing folder.jpg), but it does not. It just shows the grey folder icon which is rather ugly.
How can I teach plex to use the folder.jpg when in folder view?

best wishes.

1 Like
2

Folder view doesn’t support covers.
Why don’t you make proper Albums out of these?
They will appears just fine in a music library?

3

so in each folder the “album” tag has to be the same, right? or is it “album artist”?

4

album view does not work properly, because if you have various artists on an album (most cases) then it shows them as “various artists” instead of the album name. folder view would be the best option and I guess it has been asked before. is it too hard to implement?

1 Like
5

@naddel81 said:
album view does not work properly, because if you have various artists on an album (most cases) then it shows them as “various artists” instead of the album name. folder view would be the best option and I guess it has been asked before. is it too hard to implement?

Hard to say.
All we know for sure is if you want it to work right do it like everybody else is doing it that doesn’t want to wait. Call us the ‘Immediate Gratification Crowd’.

It’s also a hoot, at times:
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/1346348/#Comment_1346348

6

@naddel81 said:
album view does not work properly, because if you have various artists on an album (most cases) then it shows them as “various artists” instead of the album name. folder view would be the best option and I guess it has been asked before. is it too hard to implement?

You can put what you like into the AlbumArtist meta tag, if you don’t like it to appear under VA.
You could use the game title or the game developer or the game ‘universe’ (if you have several albums which fit into there)
The AlbumTitle tag has to be the same in all tracks for one album of course.
And putting each album into an own folder doesn’t hurt as well.

If you put the ‘Local Media Assets’ into topmost position under
Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - last.fm
then Plex will primarily use your embedded meta tags instead of the (sometimes faulty) information from last.fm. Then this ‘Various Artist’ issue doesn’t exist.

Each track can have a different ‘TrackArtist’ btw. So if you have some tracks which are produced by a more famous Artist, its name will appear in the album view.

I whipped up an improvised soundtrack library.
I created an AlbumArtist ‘Ghost in the Shell’ because that is what I already had for soundtrack music.

You can see here, that there are individually named TrackArtists

7

If folder.jpg is in the same folder as the music tracks, Album view should work just fine. Here’s a screenshot from my library:

z649oywimd03.png625×594 273 KB

It shows the ‘Various Artists’ as well as the album name. Does this differ from what you are seeing?

8

well, the music listing in plex is just faulty and I can proove it:
when I select album view and then album title it shows two different albums for one and the same (only because the artists differ):

albumbugwzss5.png2051×401

BUT I did not select “show me the artists”. I just told plex to show me the albums by title.

best option would still be folder view and folder.jpg. it is so simple and easy. I do not get how folder view cannot show folder.jpg.
that is just not right.

1 Like
10

just checked the tags again and they are identical on album + album artist. but still plex shows the as “disc 1” and “disc 2” although I have checked “local media tag” agent or what it’s called.
I just wishes plex would not try to be so smart and just use the folder view with folder.jpg for the folders. windows can do it, so why can’t plex?

1 Like
11

Plex will not re-read embedded meta data.
If you add some files first, then edit their metadata because the display in Plex is not as intended,
you have to perform the Plex Dance “light” (with music, step 4 can be omitted)

12

good to know. so a simple “reload metadata” won’t do the trick with music? how come music and movies are treated differently here?

13

ok, just performed the “dance” and still this:

wu6x9j07cb8x.png880×271 280 KB

and althought the tags are identical. only difference: the soundtrack is thoroughly separated into different folders. please don’t tell me plex is not clever enough to handle subfolders for music


14

@naddel81 said:
and althought the tags are identical. only difference: the soundtrack is thoroughly separated into different folders. please don’t tell me plex is not clever enough to handle subfolders for music


Depends. If the tags are immaculate, you can use subfolders which are beside each other.
But in general you should assemble all tracks on one disc of an album into one folder.

You can do also this:

Soundtracks /
   Bizzarre Creations /
      Blur Soundtrack /
         Disc 1 /
            01. trackartist - tracktitle.mp3
            02. trackartist - tracktitle.mp3
            ...
         Disc 2 /
            01. trackartist - tracktitle.mp3
            02. trackartist - tracktitle.mp3
            ...

Make sure you have all tracks tagged with their ‘disc number’ and their ‘track number’ as well. This is kinda important with multi-disc releases.
These are separate meta tags. A disc number does not belong into the ‘AlbumTitle’ tag!
Nor does the track number belong into the TrackTitle!

15

thanks for helping me out. it looks like this in the folder:

731×245 11.7 KB

and I have the tags clean on all the tracks. so the album is the same and plex should group them together.

but obviously it doesn’t.

16

I don’t see either
‘AlbumArtist’
nor ‘Disc #’
nor ‘Track #’
meta tags

17

album artist does not exist in metadata. disc and track are necessary for plex to recognize it correctly?

18

@naddel81 said:
album artist does not exist in metadata.

That’s why you need to set it.
According to your screenshot it is called ‘Bizzarre Creations’

disc and track are necessary for plex to recognize it correctly?

At least for multi-disc albums, I’d say yes.

btw. mp3tag has a function called ‘filename to tag’
you can use it to quickly set the Track# tags - at least on these tracks where the filename contains the track number in some way
%track%_%dummy% should do it for the tracks which are named like 10_One_on_One.mp3

19

thanks for your help. apparently disc number fixed it. now I have some work to do
 :frowning:

20

@naddel81 said:
thanks for your help. apparently disc number fixed it. now I have some work to do
 :frowning:

And once you have all the meta tags in order, you can use mp3tag to make your file names beautiful. :smiley:

‘Tag > Filename’ $num(%track%,2). %artist% - %title%

21

@naddel81 said:
good to know. so a simple “reload metadata” won’t do the trick with music? how come music and movies are treated differently here?

Good question! This one has been discussed quite a lot. The ‘Plex Dance’ is a workaround for one or more bugs in Plex that have been around for so long, the workaround acquired a name.

Glad you got this resolved.