Coming to this a bit late, but my Music Library contains about 25K tracks and about 1,500 albums and with Plex set to use the ‘Plex Music’ scanner etc. I can import all this repeatedly and reliably, so I don’t think there’s any major problems with Plex. Not that it’s perfect, but big messes such as shown above indicate to me that the metadata tagging and file naming is not completely to Plex’s liking. Despite claims of everything being correct, there are examples above of tags being hopelessly out of sync with what Plex wants and to be honest is clearly explained in the documentation (such as there is). Also, did I read someone claiming their album cover art (causing a problem) was ‘correctly named for each artist and/or album’? I have found that simply using ‘cover.jpg’ and placing it in the album’s folder works perfectly 100% of the time. I believe there are some alternative words that can be used, but is ‘named for the album’ actually recommended? If not, why try to use it and then wonder why it doesn’t work perfectly.
One small point, trying to rename something just to a different case is always problematic. Some systems are case sensitive, others not and that ensures there will never be 100% consistency. I am unable to rename Mail folders in MacOS just to a different case for this very reason. In order to achieve what I require, I have to rename to something else entirely, then back to what I actually want. To a human, such a simple change seems exactly that - simple. But to a computer that may see both versions as being identical it is not simple. This is not a Plex problem and no point complaining about it. Just work your way around the problem. It’s just one of the many ways we have to adjust in order to make use of modern technology.
In a perfect world, software would understand and be able to work perfectly for every user. However, people have very different requirements and in the real world in this day and age, software has to rely on users following certain rules. If something works for you, without you apparently having to do so, it’s because those rules happen to suit what you want so you don’t notice.
I’ve looked at a lot of music software over the years (and once worked with the music licensing agency here in the UK, so have a pretty good grasp of the complexities and idiosyncrasies of music data) and have never found any software that perfectly fitted my needs, i.e. without having to modify my expectations in order to use it. On the whole, Plex works pretty well. Incredibly frustrating at times, but I have found the rules it imposes to be largely sensible and with some small effort on my part, it does what I need. Trying to ‘buck the system’ and use some different scheme for file naming and tagging is just going to cause tears.
When you are following EXACTLY what you are supposed to do and then Plex doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do? That’s when you know it’s a Plex problem and for this, I agree, there needs to be a more direct line of support. Relying on the forum is basically hopeless as huge numbers of questions are left unanswered. Support needs to be better than this or users will simply go elsewhere.
