PLEX in 2020 is broken for music management and needs fixes

General Discussions
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Every recent update brings more and more bugs into Plex, to a point that it’s pretty awful at this point.

The devs really need to start paying attention to music management in Plex. They have been focusing on Movies and TV and in the process completely destroyed the app for music lovers.

I recently did a clean Windows install and without doing any backups or restores, just set up a clean Plex Server and pointed it to add music into the library. What I got was a complete disaster.

This is the same music I used to set up the same server about 18 months ago, when it all worked perfectly.

Album art missing from random albums even though I used a local scrub. Just randomly, Plex doesn’t use some album art while it uses others. When running a “Refresh All Metadata” command, it fixes some art but not all. I had to run a metadata refresh on every single album individually in order to pull album art. Even then, some albums got fixed while others needed a manual poster import.

Then we go into album duplication. Even though I have all albums tagged exactly the same, with each track having the same exact album title, artist, genre, etc. Plex will often slit some albums into two or three without any reason whatsoever. I then have to again, manually merge the albums.

Then there are problems with shuffling, where Plex simply WILL NOT shuffle some songs into the rotation. You have to create some elaborate playlists with multiple parameters to shuffle the whole library. Again, this was never a problem before.

Then we go into actually playing the music through the app. Often, the songs skip, or I get an error that the media is unplayable, or the song just skips to the next track in the middle of it. It doesn’t matter if I am on the same home network or away from home. It’s just a horrible mess.

I feel a bit let down, because I loved Plex about 18 months ago, bought Premium for lifetime, and today, the app is a huge time sink and in a lot of ways unusable.

The devs really need to step up their game.

4 Likes
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And here I thought I was the only one having those issues…

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Yep. There will NO answer regarding any of this. Plex doesn’t care about music management anymore. It seems they switched over to MusicBrainz for metadata management and basically washed their hands of it completely.

Issues that continue to need fixing (and probably never will):

  1. Having multiple versions of albums causes big issues. Despite having the albums tagged differently (i.e. having the second version named Deluxe Edition, etc…) Plex will simply treat them as the same album and sometimes combines them . For example, I recently purchased the DE of Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell. I also have the original non-DE. Plex didn’t like this. It took the second disc of the DE and combined it with the original version and left the DE with only the first disc. Not even the Plex Dance was able to fix this. The only solution was to remove the original version from the library permanently (which is NOT a solution). On top of that, for some Deluxe Editions, it will not display the alternate name I’ve tagged it with. Other albums that refuse to behave include Type O Negative’s Bloody Kisses (original and Digipak) and Slipknot’s Vol. 3 (original and Special Edition). For Bloody Kisses, it completely mixes up the tracks from each version of the album. Also, if you have a box set that contains whole albums that you already have stand-alone versions of elsewhere in your collection, forget about it – FUBAR city. Plex never used to have a problem with this.

  2. Plex still randomly will not pull or use my local embedded art for some albums. I’ve suspected for a while that Plex doesn’t even bother with embedded art anymore despite listing those options. This used to not be an issue. Sometimes I can fix this within Plex but most times I can’t. It shouldn’t be pulling ANYTHING except my embedded art. Why is this so hard?

  3. Plex will still, on occasion, not be able to properly combine all discs from a multi-disc set. I have the Black Sabbath Black Box. Everything is tagged perfectly (I’ve seriously checked about two dozen times) but no matter how many times I do the Plex Dance, it still can’t keep it in one title. This, also, was something that used to work and now doesn’t. I also had to remove it from my collection semi-permanently.

There are many more but I’m tired of typing. Being a beta tester for Plex is not what I planned on when I signed up for Plex Pass. Especially when most music library and metadata issues reported don’t even get a real response anymore. A year ago, it worked much better than it does now. I don’t know how something can go down the tubes so fast. Every update seems to break something that has worked for years. Unfortunately, Plex is still the best thing going for those of us who wish to stream our own music collections but I feel worse and worse about the buying the Lifetime Plex Pass all the time. The second something better finally comes along, I will make the switch and not look back.

4 Likes
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I agree. Half of my music or more is missing. Where is the stuff that it doesn’t categorize?

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