[Plex Media Server] Forum Preview for Music Metadata

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Over the past few months we have been rewriting much of the code inside PMS that handles metadata refreshes for music (using the Plex Music agent). Currently we still rely heavily on legacy Python agent code for this unlike our updated Movie and TV agents which were all written from the ground up to use native C++ code.

We’re almost ready to push these changes out to our beta builds, however as the amount of changes here are quite substantial we felt it was prudent to give some early testers the chance to provide feedback and report any issues before this goes into beta.

What changes should I expect?

These changes will not be very exciting to most and you should hopefully not notice much has changed with your music once you’ve installed the new server build. That being said, music libraries should refresh quicker and the supporting metadata should take up less hard disk space than the previous implementation.

We also tweaked the “Prefer local metadata” option to more strictly adhere to the local tag data inside the music files.

If you have a PlexPass, the automatic lyric downloads should be more consistent now and work better in general giving more coverage to your library than in the past. We have also provided a library setting to disable these automatic lyrics completely if you don’t want or need them.

Who should be testing these preview builds?

Well, you’ll want to have local music first; besides that you should be willing to test out non-release software and expect bugs to be present. You should always ensure you have a fresh backup of your current PMS libraries/database if you wish to install this over your current install. It is recommended to always keep preview builds separate from your main install if possible.

Which areas need testing?

  • Creating new music libraries: are you able to create new music libraries successfully?
  • Refreshing existing libraries: are you able to refresh existing libraries and artists/albums?
  • Scanning: do all your music files get picked up when initiating a library scan?
  • Matching: are albums and artists matching to the correct names?
  • Artwork: is artist and album artwork downloading as expected? Is the Album Art advanced preference working as you expect?
  • Artist bios: are artist biographies showing up on the artist pages? Is the Artist Bios advanced preference working as you expect?
  • Album reviews & ratings: are album reviews and critic (percentage) ratings showing on albums? Is the Album Reviews and Critic Ratings advanced preference working as you expect?
  • Popular tracks: does the popular tracks section show up on artist pages? Is the Popular Tracks advanced preference working as you expect?
  • Lyrics: Are lyrics automatically available for tracks you would expect to have lyrics (Plex Pass only)? Do you use local lyrics and are they working as expected? Is the Find Lyrics advanced preference working as you expect?
  • Concerts: is concert data showing for artists where you expect it to? Is the Concerts advanced preference working as you expect?
  • Music videos: if you have local extras for music, are they showing up correctly? If you use a “Global music video path” (this preference has now moved to Settings → Extras), do these videos also show up correctly?
  • Local metadata: with Prefer local metadata enabled, does the library show the artist, albums and tracks as you expect?
  • Genres: are genres and styles populating correctly for artists and albums? Is the Genres advanced preference working as you expect?
  • Add to Library: if you have a TIDAL subscription can you successfully add these albums/tracks to your local library? See: https://support.plex.tv/articles/add-tidal-content-to-your-plex-music-library/

Known issues:

Some testing has already been done but the fixes haven’t had time to reach the latest build yet.

  1. Sometimes local artwork for an album can get set to the artist. Work-around: none, issue not currently fully understood.
  2. There have been reports of refreshes sometimes causing the server to become unresponsive. Work-around: try disabling Loudness analysis.

Where to get the preview build:

Download Links (Updated: 2022-04-11)

Version: 1.25.10.5737-28e69ed6e [experimental preview]

Computer

NAS

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OSX / WEB UI: When adding a new album in a library, WEB UI shows the relevant artists image in the “Recent Plays” hub despite nothing has been played. Is it expected?

Note: Where do I report translation issues?

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Are you installing this over an existing database?

Depends which app you’re seeing the issue is.

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Yes I did. I used this executable in place of the regular beta one. I added another library on top of the exiting one and I 'm moving albums form one to the other for the purpose of the test.

Note: If I add an album that wasn’t previously in the existing database then the relevant artist does not appear in Recent Plays

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In the WEB UI

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Does this include MusicBrainz <Guid> tags in the XML?

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It should.

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Any chance at all that this will respect the genre tag inside a file, and more important, will Plex actually show proper results when you filter by genre and tracks? That is, not the combined genre currently shown for an album, but results properly displayed by track genre. (example: compilation albums which may have several genres, but not all genres apply to each track)

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It’s something that we’re looking into but only after these changes land.

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I can confirm that the MusicBrainz <Guid> tag is present. Thanks.

Other differences I noticed in the XML data.

  • The old agent had a <Director> tag for albums which is no longer present with the new agent.
  • The old agent had a <Format> tag for albums which is no longer present with the new agent. I had “Group albums by type” disabled in the server settings.
  • There are a lot fewer <Mood> tags for albums.

All other metadata appears to be identical just based on the couple artists/albums that I checked.

Does “Fix Match” work with an mbid- prefix?

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Are you sure you’re not thinking of <Producer>? We’ve never saved Director tags on albums. I see we are supposed to be storing Producer but I’m not actually sure where that data is supposed to be coming from - I’ll look into it!

Not sure why that would be any different, do you have some example albums I can take a look at?

It always worked just with the mbid’s directly, at least for albums. You should just be able to put the release id in there and it should get the perfect match.

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Here is the metadata for four different albums from PMS 1.25.9.5673 vs. PMS 1.25.10.5704. You can see the <Director> and <Mood> tags. I also included the library agent settings for both versions as well.

https://gist.github.com/JonnyWong16/7f52f6a4881a2fd1cee6527e46c259aa

Note that I “Refreshed All Metadata” for the entire library on both PMS versions right before retrieving the XML.

Yeah, just wondering about using a mbid- prefix to be consistent with imdb-, tmdb-, and tvdb-.

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Thanks!

Both these are bugs with the current implementation:

  1. The <Director> tag shouldn’t exist on albums - this is meant to be <Studio> but we don’t store these on albums yet.
  2. The additional mood data is unintentionally getting pulled up from the album’s tracks. I’m quite sure this is not the intended behaviour but will ask about it.

I’ll make sure it allows both :+1:

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It’s great to see the kind of testing I am currently too lazy to do!

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I’ve just pushed an updated build. This fixes the issue where merged artists wouldn’t stick along with some other things.

The new build restores this behaviour, after discussing this internally we decided to keep the existing behaviour for now. That means if any tracks have moods those moods also apply to the album.

This should also work as expected now.

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Hello,

I sincerely hope that his update will address the issue of not showing the first artwork embedded in a music file (like the one that is shown in iTunes) but just a random one if there are more than one artworks.

Thanks
ub

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Hi @drzoidberg33. I just stumbled upon this thread, and while reading about the upcoming changes in the first post I noticed you mentioned the music videos (extras).

Are these changes fixing this bug with extras in Music libraries I just reported? It was with version 1.25.9.5721 of the macOS server (latest one).

Thanks for your help.