Plex Music agent not finding album on MusicBrainz

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
1

I am trying to get my live albums tagged correctly within Plex and so that they function correctly in Plexamp. I successfully edited 3 of them in MusicBrainz and after refreshing metadata in Plex, 2 of the albums matched and moved into Live section of the artist. One of the album refuses to connect to the MusicBrainz album.

The albums at play here are Metallica’s performances from Montreal in 2023. This was a two-day show (unique setlists and albums). My problem is with day one (2023-08-11). Day two (2023-08-13) worked exactly as expected and is searchable within Plex when using Match. Day one only returns the result for day two with a 49 score. Day one does not appear in the search for Fix Match. All the edits were done the same and on the same day in MusicBrainz. It has been 5 days since the edits were done. The only open edits remaining on both are voting on the cover images which has not impacted Plex’s ability to retrieve the Day Two match.

Upon searching in the forum, the closest I could find was trying to search by MBID in the search pane, but this did not return any searches. It was probably a long shot as I think that was from a previous version of the search functionality.

As a further test, I added a whole new release for another Metallica live show, the same way that I edited the others in MusicBrainz, and that one matched the next day within Plex. All edits were auto-approved.

I have exhausted all avenues to match my Day One album to the entry in MusicBrainz.
I have tried:

  • Removing the album from Plex, emptying trash, re-adding the album into Plex
  • Re-ripping the album off of the CDs, adding the tags from MusicBrainz using Picard
  • Modifying the Fix Match search using just “2023” as the album as the MusicBrainz album title is " 2023-08-11: Stade olympique, Montréal, Qc" (no entry for this returns within Plex)
  • Adding a new music library in Plex and only adding my Metallica artist - same results as primary library
  • Optimized database
  • Cleaned bundles

MusicBrainz links
Day One album (cannot be found by Plex): https://musicbrainz.org/release/54a8e713-dfde-4ae3-a039-71bd5b1a56cd
Day Two album (found by Plex): https://musicbrainz.org/release/3637d79b-60a6-4700-9bc4-9a73b0624b74
Third live album I added (found by Plex): Release “2017-08-16: Commonwealth Stadium, Edmonton, AB, Canada” by Metallica - MusicBrainz

Server Version#: 1.40.2.8395
Player Version#: 4.128.1

2

Use the Musicbrainz ID number in the Fix Match dialog.
or
Embed the Musicbrainz ID as meta tag (Musicbrainz Picard will do that for you)
or
embed the RELEASETYPE tag with content album;live

3

Fix Match returns no search results using the MBID in the Fix Match dialog.

image
image732×463 13.1 KB

I already embedded all of the Musicbrainz data into the files for the album using Picard. Still no results/matches in Plex after metadata refresh. This also embedded the releasetype tag as suggested.
image
image

4

When was this album created? Is it brand new on Musicbrainz, or currently under community approval? If so, it may take 72 hours until it appears in Plex.

5

The album was already in the database when I first edited it at the same time as the second set in the series. Picard successfully finds and links to the release. Both edits were made and completed on the same day between the Day One 2023-08-11 and Day Two 2023-08-13 sets.

It has been 5 days since I made the edits in musicbrainz and it does not appear to be held for community approval.

6

Which file format is used?

Is “prefer local metadata” enabled or disabled in the properties of the music library?

7

FLAC files. Prefer local metadata is disabled.

8

I’ve found that I get results faster with this option enabled – if all your music is as carefully tagged as this one.

9

My collection of music is not as well managed as it spans decades of files and systems. I only went this in-depth to try to solve the issue I’m having with Plex and this one album. Doubt I will go back and do the same for all the other albums I have as that is just a lot of work that is already solved with the Plex Music agent.

Would really like a solution that let’s me keep using the Plex Music agent (the intended use case of Plex as I understand). This seems to be some kind of issue in the Plex agent system not being able to find the release from the musicbrainz database.

10

Refreshed metadata today and Plex finally matched the album. Pretty confused why it took a full week for Plex to find that release despite two others (newer edits) showed up right away.

Oh well. At least I know I didn’t make any tagging issues in musicbrainz or my files.

Thanks for your time, Otto.