Plex certainly has some challenges in handling classical music, but if you get the files and tags in order, it will generally work, with a minor “cheat.” On that Help page, take note of the advice to organize your files into a folder structure. If all your music files are in one big flat folder, Plex will not do well. Hopefully there’s some improvement coming on that issue, but it’s necessary for now.
As the Help page linked above also notes, if you are configured to use embedded tags, they really do need to be accurate. Using the track you provided, and information I found on Musicbrainz, I mocked up the entire album, tagged them the way I would normally do, and let Plex scan it.
Embedded tags:
Some things to note here:
- While the tagging standards allow for track numbers to be something like “13/16,” Plex doesn’t do well with that. Add to that, your file was tagged with the track number of “13/0.” That’s saying this is track 13 of a total of zero tracks. That would confuse any software. You’d be better off with the track number simply “13.”
- In a multi-disc release, the disc number would be important (essential, really), but in a single-disc release, it’s optional. I usually leave it blank. But it, too, should be a simple digit, rather than a “1 of 3” or “1/3” format. Your file is tagged “0/0” which, again would confuse any program that relies on it.
- More info on accurate tagging can be found in this Tips post.
After I got the files organized and tagged, this is what Plex came up with:
Artist:
Album:
As you can see, Plex did it just about right, according to the tags I used. The “cheat” I referred to earlier is that I used the composer’s name, Webern, as the Album Artist. Technically, the actual performer on this album is The Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Pierre Boulez.
Plex failed to find the album cover, but that may be due to the title in the Album tag not precisely matching what Musicbrainz has. If I had the album cover available locally, Plex would have found it anyway. I manually did a “Fix Match,” and Plex found the correct album and artwork.
