I’m at my wits end and am requesting community advice/intervention.
I used iTunes (for far-to-long) and hoped Plex would be a good replacement. Within iTunes i curated my music genres to fit my musical liking. I quickly realized Plex has issues importing that data properly unless modified. So i deleted, modified and re-uploaded my Plex music library with no luck. After researching the internet I discovered Plex was having trouble parsing my genres. After some research I discovered I needed to change my Genres to include semi-colons rather than commas. So I spent my entire summer of 2023 modifying each individual track file replacing commas with semi-colon separators to help differentiate my personal genres just for Plex. Sadly iTunes still applies genres to impact each individual song while Plex only applies genres for Artist or Album. In other words, every song on an album or by an artist will apply the common genre to every single song. So if an artist sings one song in Spanish or has one song that is instrumental, by attempting to apply that genre for only the ONE SONG metadata, Plex will apply it to ALL SONGS on the album or by the artist for some reason thereby ruining my Smart Playlists. The only solution I am left with is to personally go through my entire library and make every song a SINGLE (it’s own album) going forward and/or by using an “Artist (+genre1)”, “Artist (+genre2)” differentiation. Has anyone figured out a better way to resolve this ridiculousness? I’ve watched Plex ignore suggested genre fixes going back 10 years now so i am fairly certain they don’t give a ■■■■ about resolving the issue at this point. Also, I find PlexAmp to be useless, likely because they are still using my (useless) Artist/Album genres (cant believe this is working well for anyone at this point).
Sadly, this genre catastrophe makes Plex music EXTREMELY useless for me (and many others). Is there a Plex solution/workaround? Is there a better music server solution than Plex (Jellyfin, Emby, Apache, etc)? Unbelievable, something so stupid makes me want to walk away from Plex as a lifetime customer. They do fine with video streaming but music is clearly the after thought …
I have noticed this too. It looks like it’s how the tables interact in the background. The Album table is tied to the Genre, not the Track table. It’s pretty pointless if you ask me, especially considering there are plenty of mixed-genre albums out there, such as soundtracks and collection albums.
It’s possible I’m misunderstanding what is being requested, but the ability to filter individual tracks by genre (and therefore create smart playlists/collections based on it) was added to Plex Media Server version 1.40.0.7775.
The current beta supports track genres but still has some issues which need addressing. A new beta should be out early next week with a public release following shortly.
The metadata will have to be refreshed first, you can either do this manually or if you have the scheduled task to periodically update metadata it will do it automatically over time.
Thanks for the update @drzoidberg33. I’m looking forward to your full update. Any recomendations on how to import iTunes (not Apple music) playlist rules to Plex?
@drzoidberg33, Is your solution working? Any update on the official public release? I don’t have the Beta version installed since I use an Android Shield as my server (and not certain how to get Beta on that device). Do I need to delete my library and re-add? My metadata is set to refresh and I initiated manually but still find the playlists inaccurate.
I downloaded the BETA version on my Mac and created a second server. I do see Track Genre but it isn’t working very well. Example, it finds a few songs with Spanish track genre, but a lot more songs if I use Artist genre. Using Artist genre defeats the purpose since not all songs by an artist or on an album are in Spanish. also, since this is a new server on my Macbook it is not an update metadata issue since it was all recently created. Also the Track Genre is pointing to songs that I confirmed DO NOT even have that genre (Spanish) almost like Track genre is pulling all songs by the Artist (since the artist has one song with that genre). Something is VERY broken.
Update!!! After studying the above image (link- Plex Music Genre Issue - #6 by pshanew), I may have figured out what ‘’‘‘I’’‘’ am doing wrong (@pshanew). If I create my Smart Collection/Playlist and don’t change the Drop Down to only apply Track rather than the default Artist it will only choose Artists and apply to ALL songs even if I specify Track Genre. —I didn’t see this initially—. I kinda feel like its a bug and an update should be considered, but either way I will work with my new knowledge, and see if I can find any more “bugs”!
I still notice Artist Genre lists more songs than Track genre. I attempted to update metadata even with it being a new server, but who knows how these genres are being read by Plex at this point.
No updates in months. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX(I deleted this content and will update later)
Another user reached out to me (privately) to give some local troubleshooting advice which I appreciated and shall attempt. Then I will update my thread with any conclusions. Cheers
