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For years now I’ve had an issue where PMS will match music it fails to recognize under a specific artist. That artist is “Sasha” (the DJ, aka Alexander Coe). The fact that it’s this artist is probably completely arbitrary, because there’s no reason I can figure out as to why it keeps selecting this artist and not any other one. (Maybe he has ID #1 in the database or something silly like that?)
But if I add a track that the Plex Music agent fails to recognize, and it doesn’t have ID3 tags, then it consistently gets filed as a track under Sasha, usually in an album named “Unknown Album”. It’s not always the same “Unknown Album” though – there are now several listed under Sasha. Sometimes it gets the album name right but still gets the artist wrong.
And often it does this for music that does have proper ID3 tags. Or music that really ought to be matched by the Plex Music agent, and I have to match it manually.
Why is this happening? It’s making my music library difficult to manage. I can’t rely on Plex to match any music properly.
Update 1:
Actually the situation is a bit worse than I originally thought… very often Plex will match some arbitrary portion of an album as being by Sasha, and the rest will be matched correctly. Sometimes it’s half the tracks, sometimes it’s just a handful. On a few occasions it will split the tracks up among three or more albums, one of which is correct, the others are different albums under Sasha. It can be a huge mess to clean up. Picking the option to “Fix Match” will often not add the incorrectly matched tracks to the correct album, and instead will create another album from another artist with the same name as the correct artist and album, and then I’ll have to dig through my music library and manually merge them together! But all of these are possibilities, and it’s never consistent.
Update 2:
Just to give an idea of the sort of mess I have to sort out, I just fixed an album that was erroneously labeled as “Sasha”, and the individual tracks were randomly split into four different albums with absurd garbage names. I clicked the “Fix Match” button on each of these and selected the correct album, and each time it created a separate album with that name, keeping the tracks split up, rather than moving all tracks to just one album. I tried to get the matching to move them to the correct album on its own, figuring maybe there was more than one version of the album that Plex could match against, but no, there was only one, and so I gave up and just merged the albums together.
But now the tracks were still wrong because this album was a compilation including 4 discs, and many of the tracks were placed under the wrong disc for no reason, even though when matching it I can see the album’s information in the matching screen and it knew which tracks went under which discs. So then I had to manually fix all of that! What a nightmare! This is exactly the sort of thing Plex shouldn’t force me to do!
This doesn’t happen with all of my music, thank goodness, and not even most of it. But it still happens enough that managing my music library is a serious job. I’d say it happens around 20% of the time. That’s awful! What on Earth is going wrong?
Update 3:
This problem is far worse than I thought. I looks like there’s more than one artist that things will get erroneously matched as… apparently several of my albums were matched under “Andy Allo” for no particular reason, even though the music was totally unrelated to this artist.
