Why, when I ask to rescan my music Library (which currently has 2 albums), it goes to rescan all my family photos?
Does selecting Scan in one section cause Plex to scan everything?
Another question: So I manually changed the Seal DTS disc from “Various Artists” to “Seal”. Then I added a few other mp3 Seal albums to the root Artist folders… metadata is good. On a scan, Plex has created another artist called Seal… but as far as I can tell, the Artist name and Sort Artist name is exactly the same: “Seal”.
- How do I correct the fact I now have 2 artists name Seal.
- How do I prevent this in the future?
The current music naming standard that Otto mentioned is important. How important you ask? I’ll share what Plex has to say in Why Is Some of My Content Not Found
- The biggest reason by far for items to not be found during a library scan is due to naming.
I always have my filenames exactly match the Plex standard. I always have Picard tag the files too. MP3Tag can do that, but Plex relies on Musicbrainz who makes Picard and Picard adds tags like
MUSICBRAINZ_RELEASETRACKID : 1400d40c-a0d3-40d7-9dfb-9dd32c6cbb08
MUSICBRAINZ_RELEASEGROUPID : 6ae76995-b59f-3206-bfd9-83378eac5b4e
You asked about DTS files. Plex Players will play that out to your receiver / DAC. There is no need to change those files. Just name them correctly. Downsides? It’s not gapless playback afaik, well at least not on my system.
naming example showing mka, dts, ac3 tracks working
$ tree "Pink Floyd"
Pink Floyd
└── Dark Side Of The Moon
├── 01 - Speak To Me.mka
├── 02 - Breathe (In The Air).mka
├── 03 - On The Run.mka
├── 04 - Time.mka
├── 05 - The Great Gig In The Sky.dts
├── 06 - Money.mka
├── 07 - Us And Them.ac3
├── 08 - Any Colour You Like.mka
├── 09 - Brain Damage.mka
└── 10 - Eclipse.mka
1 directory, 10 files
You asked about putting the year in parentheses in your Album names, and I was impolite and told you how to do it Plex’s way. Your folder structure is great too, and we can make it work 
If it’s a retail album you match correctly and tag in Picard, you’re all set.
You asked about only scanning your music test library not all of them.
On the library name in the left column Rollover it → kebab menu ︙ → Scan Library Files
If everything that has to do with Seal has correct folder names and filenames now, then you fix the duplicate usually by taking your top level Seal folder, moving it ouf of the library so Plex can’t see it anymore, then erase any traces Plex has of Seal by doing a Plex Dance. By that I mean you use the Plex Player menus to
- Scan Library Files
- Empty Trash
- Clean Bundles
- Optimize the Database
Doing those four things cleans Plex of any knowledge of Seal. Then you put the Seal folder back and Scan. To prevent duplicates, name and tag your albums correctly in an outside folder staging area, before introducing them to Plex Media Server. Once PMS scans them try not to change them.
@ Nibbles: Thanks for this - a lot of good stuff there. I’ve fixed the double Seal problem and will be adding more albums to my sandbox soon. Right now, I can play that Seal DTS on Windows Desktop machines - but not via my Shield TV on Plex Android. The Shield is on HDMI pass-through - and my movies all work in surround… but when I play the Seal DTS album I only get stereo. That means that either Plex or Shield is not passing thru - but instead doing some base transcoding to PCM 2.0
Anyway, once I sort that out, I’ll add a larger cross-section of tracks and more tests…
Thanx again.
Unfortunately it won’t help.
Can you elaborate? Helped me in that one case I had, afaik.
edit: you did explain further up, skipped that before. Maybe I have matched that particular album manually, I don’t remember.
Yes - I’m curious about this too, You cannot read metadata from a matroska container?
Plex cannot.
OK - I guess I am a bit surprised since a lot of the above is based on tag metadata.
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On the basis of a good container system that works, why you would not support MKV/MKA? Is there a reason?
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From the context of supporting a surround audio format - what surround format with metadata do you reasonably support?
Hmmm - I think unless the DTS metadata is transferred to a FLAC container during encode, it won’t play correctly. Dial Norm and a bunch of other metadata used in various surround formats (Dolby, DTS) are critical and need to be maintained. Therefore, I don’t believe it cannot be decoded from DTS to PCM - and then FLAC encoded. The FLAC file has to encode the DTS stream un-decoded… and then it might work. Also, the file should not be bigger because the DTS compression should be maintained. (If you first convert to PCM - then yes, it would be larger - but no metadata.)
I’m curious if this is possible since the encode process needs to be bit accurate - or you just get noise. If any PLEX user has experience with this, I would be very grateful to understand how this works.
Shield should be able to passthrough any format via HDMI - and as long as you AVR has a decoder for the embedded audio format, it should work. The problem I currently have with my new Shield Pro - and PLEX - is that it will passthrough DTS - and anything else - to my AVR when it is a video format and through the PLEX Video Player. But the PLEX Audio Player wants to transcode to stereo.
From the Sheild on-line docs, they state: “DTS audio will not be converted and will be passed directly to the HDMI output.”
See here:
AVR / Surround Audio Setup (nvidia.com)
The PLEX Android Audio player is very basic and I’m pretty sure my problems are associated with it.
BTW: Works perfectly in Windows.
Back to Music Lbraries and database issues:
I’ve added a few more albums and PLEX has incorrectly defined an album as a single or EP. I cannot find away of over-riding this, and checking my metadata w/mp3tag revealed no comment on EP etc.
One of those albums has both FLAC and mp3 versions. Does PLEX not separate albums based on file format? Even the lowly WMP did that perfectly well…
Any work-arounds so that I don’t have each track back-to-back, first as FLAC than as mp3?
I’ve been trying to find info on the Plex site regarding how recordings are set as an Album, as an EP as a Compilation or Live albums - and have been striking out.
With only 6 artists worth of albums put in my sandbox there are errors on nearly every artist. Ix this driven by metadata?
Why is Steely Dan Citizen, CD 1 and 3 are under Albums but CD 2 is a Compilation and CD 4 is missing. Is there a wiki or KB on the Plex music database system?
Album release types are scraped from Musicbrainz, this is also where things get matched to. BUT what’s interesting you shouldn’t even be able to have this feature since it’s Plex Pass only. 
That Plex doesn’t separate albums by file type makes total sense, since they have the same metadata. Workaround: delete those (unnecessary?) mp3, Plex will transcode from FLAC if necessary.
I have Plex Pass… I decided to do the Black Friday update special.
In this case, Music Brainz has problems on very basic and well-known discography.
I am assuming that stuff gets pulled down from the cloud on to my Plex Server. Can I blow this data out and have it re-populated? Maybe something has gone amiss. This should be brain-dead easy.
IMHO cloud databases are notoriously inaccurate. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and have a ton of experience here in consumer, archival and broadcast systems. To NOT have a way of over-writing the cloud metadata is frankly lazy. Steely Dan is a very well-known and well documented artist/discography. What hopes do I have when I get into esoteric jazz or electronica?
Stick to the folder structure described above and to embedded metatags.
But they don’t have the same metadata - one is an mp3 file format and the other is FLAC. I have lossy DTS and DTS HDMA 5.1 24-96; created from DVD-A. They all have different metadata. So IMHO, it makes no sense at all.
This is Plex putting a limit on whether to use technical metadata or not. They are all derivatives, and each should be handled separately - or at least accommodated in some way in a single database system. Even the largely abandoned and lowly Windows Media Player handled this.
BTW: The whole audiophile statements on Plex is completely counter to real-time transcoding. Sorry but I spent a career in professional mastering I guess I have to manage a completely separate system for my mobile devices because right now I have mp3’s for mobile devices - and FLAC for my home playback systems.
So: I will NOT delete my mp3’s
I have. My test Sandbox is only this. I transfer a small set of files and test and check. WHen things go wrong I go back and test metadata and have used mp3Tag to refresh metadata incase something is off… but so far, that action has not corrected results in Plex.
Its why I asked if I can delete all metadata for the music library and try again. Where is an on-line manual or wiki???
Folder structure:
mp3tag Metadata:
Yet part of Citizen is in Albums and part in Compilations.
PS & BTW: I removed the Year in the folder structure and rescanned - no difference. I tried this also in my first tests - and as other have attested here, it does not seem to matter. Also, since ALL of the files are in a single folder, it’s hard to argue that the year would affect SOME of the files but not the rest.
Is “Prefer Local meta tags” activated?
