Plex is ignoring or misappropriating many of my meta-tags

[del_f7]

Hi all.

I’m finding that Plex is very often using the wrong metadata (when I’ve asked it to prefer my tags… Although I’d much rather it was an explicit instruction to actually use my tags rather than to “prefer” them).

Sometimes it uses the wrong tag for the correct album, in some cases it’s just outright using a tag from a completely different part of my library!

Unfortunately for Plex I have quite an idiosyncratic system of tagging. It seems that, when Plex recognises (for example) the artist, it seems to work correctly & when it doesn’t, it just throws its hands up into the air & grabs the nearest tag.

It should be simple enough, Just use my tags.

Here is an example:

I’ve asked Plex to sort by Album Artist

The tags for the three albums shown are as follows:

Galactic Nightmare
Artist: Alan Jefferson
Album Artist: Jefferson, Alan

A Matter Of Life And Death
Artist: Allan Gray
Album Artist: OST, A Matter Of Life And Death

We Are Science
Artist: Dot Allison
Album Artist: Allison, Dot

Plex is only correctly showing one of the three.

Here’s another example:

Claudio Abbado is a classical conductor. I have several box sets of his collected recordings & they are filed under the Album Artist “CL-A, Abbado, Claudio”

Here we can see some albums by a different classical conductor Herbert Von Karajan. They have the Album Artist tag “CL-A, Karajan, Herbert Von” & yet, for some reason, Plex has taken a completely different tag from a completely different artist & chosen to use it instead.

I can’t even begin to imagine why this is happening, but it makes Plex unusable as my main app.

I have about 22,000 album in my library & hundreds of them are being shown incorrectly.

Can anyone suggest a fix?

Is there any way I can get Plex to stop cross-referencing with the internet & just use the metadata I’ve provided?

I should add that I’ve been a Roon user for a few years but, because Plex has the Plexamp app which works brilliantly in my car, I decided to create a Plex library so that I could have music on the move. (I also love the “list” view. Roon doesn’t have that.)

I’d love to make the switch to Plex but that will be impossible if I can’t get my albums to sort correctly.

Thanks.

[Insomnic_1]

Did you already try setting your library to ‘Prefer Local Metadata’?

You could also try setting the Metadata Agent to “Personal” maybe - this link gives some info about that: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200241558-agents/

I think either or both of those settings would use your local metadata instead of internet matching.

Also, what do you intend by saying Plex is “misappropriating” your tags?

[del_f7]

Thanks.

Yes, “prefer local metadata” is set. I’ll try the other setting. Appreciate the suggestion.

Rather than taking a different field from within a given album (say, the Artist instead of the Album Artist) it’s taking a tag from a completely different album & artist and using it somewhere else.

For example, using my “CL-A, Abbado Claudio” tag & putting it with Herbert Von Karajan albums instead of using the “CL-A, Karajan, Herbert Von” with which the latter is tagged.

In other words, these are not tags that it will find on the internet, it’s taking file tags of my own devising & using them for completely different artists in my library.

The Karajan albums do not feature Abbado at all.

The other thing it’s doing is taking albums from an unrelated series, say for example the “CL-L, BBC Legends” series, some of which do contain music conducted by Claudio Abbado, & putting the “CL-A, Abbado, Claudio” Album Artist against it instead of the “CL-L, BBC Legends” Album Artist tag.

These two albums are conducted by Barbirolli & contain music by Elgar. Plex has gone & found my “CL-C, Elgar, Edward” tag from the Elgar albums & used it against these albums that are in fact tagged “CL-L, BBC Legends”. (Interestingly it didn’t go & find my “CL-A, Barbirolli, John” tag instead.)

These albums, on the other hand, are correctly listed as part of the BBC Legends series & Plex has used my tag instead of going & finding a tag by the composer or conductor in each case.

It seems completely random, but this is what I mean by “misappropriating”.

[blackzwe]

How is your media arranged?

[del_f7]

Well, it used to be folders within folders (particularly for the classical stuff) but, on the basis that Plex seemed to be correctly identifying everything that was at the top level, I’ve reorganised the library to make sure that everything fits into an ARTIST > ALBUM format, as follows:

So, for my classical stuff, where originally each disc pertaining to a given box set would have been in its own Box Set sub-folder, now, each disc of the box set has been moved up to reside inside the artist folder, the same as a band with its albums.

[Insomnic_1]

I think I’ve read before that classical music gets messy to try and manage in a lot of these music services. It might be useful to create a separate classical library.

Here are a couple threads on reddit that I found that might help a bit:
Reddit - Dive into anything - it’s pretty old but looks relevant still.
Reddit - Dive into anything - newer and comments have some good suggestions it seems.

Looks like it’s a lot of work either way and definitely seems like forcing Plex - at least for your classical music collection - to just read your raw data\info would be best.

[del_f7]

Thanks for the links.

Yes, how do I do that “raw” thing? Is that the same as the Personal Metadata Agent mentioned above or is that a different setting?

[Insomnic_1]

Someone else might have a better answer since I’ve never done it with music, but the ‘personal’ agent is used for stuff like home videos when you know it won’t match to anything online but you still want it to present in Plex as that type of media - show, movie, music - so I think that should do what you want as it should read ONLY the embedded data with that setup.

I don’t know how good it is at handling metadata it doesn’t recognize and one of those reddit posts said classical uses tags that Plex might not use so dunno how that’ll work out.

You could setup a new classical library and set it up that way and copy a few of your items into it to see how it handles it - be a good way to test it without messing with your current setup. If it doesn’t work right you can just remove it but if it works better you can either move the rest of your classical over to it or switch the setting on your current library.

[del_f7]

That’s not a bad shout.

Apart from obvious things like track titles & track/disc numbers, I confine my meta-tags to Album Title, Artist, Album Artist, Composer (but only in classical) & Date.

I have no dalliance with Works, Parts, Acts or any of the things that can traditionally get tricky. (I prefer it that way for precisely these reasons. Where possible, I include a Discogs number in the album title of every release. If I need more info, I can easily go there.)

Plex is now chugging through my library with the new preferences, so I’ll wait & see how it does & then move on to a separate library if I need to.

Thanks for the suggestion.

[del_f7]

Okay, so having let Plex run a full re-scan of my library with the new settings, very little has changed.

I also don’t think it’s a “classical” issue specifically, as Plex is ignoring or misappropriating tags all over my library.

Seeing as Plex is getting many different things wrong & I’m finding it hard… No, impossible… To find a common thread amongst the errors, I’ve decided to delete my library & re-import it. I’m wondering if the fact that I’ve restructured so much of the library has tied Plex in knots, so let’s see if a clean import will make any difference.

It’s a big library & I have a relatively poor internet connection so this could take a while. It’s been chugging away for 5 days now & it’s still going!

The first thing I can see, which might be an issue, is that it’s telling me it’s “updating metadata” on the files while it’s importing, which will not only take forever but might introduce lots of stuff to fix because I can’t go in & tell it to use my tags, etc. until the import has finished.