Well, as with another discussion I had regarding an issue - that was 100% reproduceable and would be considered a bug - Plex developers choose to respond with a mindset that “this is a feature” instead of dealing with it.
The issue in this case is not that we put things in the wrong folders. It’s that Plex is poorly built to handle the database matching. Folder structure should of course not be an issue if the tags are set properly.
Currently, even if the ID3 tags are perfect, and even if “fix match” is applied, Plex STILL chooses the wrong album artist. A random artist. That is a bug. Or at least needs improvement to be considered fully functional.
It also downloads cover images from the internet, ignoring embedded cover images. It is not possible to configure Plex to use only embedded tags, regardless of the file structure.
Same problem here. Various Artists is now my favorite band… I have a fairly large library but i only use ID3 tags to organize them. These are 100% correct and the way i want them. Sure, some files are in proper folder structures but whatever they came with. Plex now only uses Album Artist in the tracks page for some reason, which it derives from whatever source except ID3. One simple fix is to add the Artist tag from the ID3 fields. Also it tends to duplicate albums for every single tracks within that album but that may be a problem for another topic.
I don’t see the need to use proper physical file structures since media players work very well with the more extensive ID3 tagging system. Also, what would i do with all the loose MP3’s i have lying around.
@croddy0 you can choose to use local information only for album art in your library settings
If Plex music could be as good as itunes circa 2005 I would be ecstatic. Their architecture logic and development chops are shameful—illogical, poorly built software.
@Plex if you can’t make good software, or even copy established music player beat practices just turn it over to the community and let us do it for you. You’re clearly out of your depth.
Everything correctly set in the ID3 tags (both v1 and v2.3 UTF-16) with album art embedded in the vast majority of cases, and the folder structure is all logical, yet still I have large amounts of D&B listed in plex as being by the Smashing Pumpkins.
I would happily go through removing and re-adding all my music in a specific way to ensure it works properly, but I have dynamic playlists that utilise playcount as a factor, and I would prefer not to lose that info. Very annoyingly, I think this got dramatically worse when I started trying to fix the handful of cases I noticed initially.
Got a whole load of music tracks all showing “Steve Cradock” as the artist “suddenly” and for some weeks now.
I KNOW they’re all tagged up correctly when ripped - and pretty sure they USED to show correctly…
Looking carefully through by album artist - it’s clear these are all “Various Artists” albums.
I’ve manually trudged through all the affected albums and edited them to “Various Artists”.
Annoyingly the individual tracks are also set as “Album Artist” (OK, I think), but the track “Artist” is not set…
DESPITE correcting those albums a few days ago - they now REVERT back to “Steve Cradock”.
Thinking this was some kind of database corruption, I have done all of the steps to “fix” corruption outlined in one of the KB articles.
NOTE: Unfortunately because I’m still running my Plex Media Server on a rather crusty Windows Home Server 2011 (equiv. of Windows Server 2008), support was recently SILENTLY dropped for all updates since 1.22.3.4523.
The server did “upgrade” to later versions - and promptly just “stopped working”; disappearing off the face of the earth… Not even a SINGLE LOG entry upon starting the new versions even to say “incompatible OS” or some-such; just a silent non-functioning server. (WHY, oh WHY?!)
Hence updated version was fully uninstalled and the above re-instated. I’ve NO IDEA if the database was touched during the upgrade - but when I detected this Album Artist issue there were no other PMS Database backups prior to that to go back to…
P.S. Not sure if it is in any way related but earlier this year I completely re-ripped all of my CDs to high quality FLAC (lossless compressed) using dbPowerAmp CD Ripper software; which also auto-tagged everything with ID3 tags from various sources including MusicBrainz…
They were all ripped into a completely new “NewMusic” folder, deleted the old “Music” from the Library and added “NewMusic” as the only library source; been adding all new albums with same ripping method and updating the server folder.
If anything - I’d have hoped that a “fresh start” was a good thing.
Again - all seems to have been OK but then suddenly hit this “Steve Cradock” issue!
Thinking of a complete “uninstall” including the database and re-start from scratch… But what’s the point if it ignores the nicely tagged tracks and “how long” before it reverts to form???
I finally gave up. Got tired of trying to make my music match what Plex wanted. I’ve abandoned the idea of Plex being my music manager. Really wanted it to work.
