I have a fairly large music library. I have them most recently in the cloud using google music. Google Music (and EVERY OTHER player) has no problem viewing the ID3 tags. It pulls the artist & song easily. Google (and others) auto downloaded art and album info, never had to touch a thing.
I decided to try Plex (because I paid for the lifetime membership) to keep every media in one outlet. Boy what a mistake. I’ve been trying every application from FileBot, MP3tag, Easytag, kid3, etc to get the artist information to show.
Yes, its THAT bad. Plex cannot pull artist information from a ID3 tag. I’ve give up. I’ve literally spent hours trying to fix this. It’s a complete joke. I’m sorry for the negativity, but I’m extremely frustrated. Come to find out, if I did a search first, I would’ve saved a ton of time. This has been an ongoing issue for years and Plex just doesn’t care to fix it.
IMO, don’t offer a service thats 1/4th baked. If you do, mark it as BETA and warn people. In today’s age, it should be simple as pointing to your music directory, picking up ID3 tags and then downloading meta data from a server. You’d think Plex would be a MASTER at this.
Sorry for my rant, I know this is a pointless post because I see a lot of other threads and not one single solution found.
@trumpy81 said:
That is because Plex does not use the Artist tag to gather the Artist information. Plex uses the Album Artist tag for that purpose, so all your music must have the Album Artist tag present and correct, except for Various Artist albums where the Album Artist field should be left blank.
The problem is that Plex is misusing and mislabeling the ID3 tags. The ID3 spec actually has no field intended for ‘album artist.’ The ID3 tag Plex is using for ‘album artist’ is TPE2, which, in the ID3 spec, is intended for ‘Band/Orchestra/Accompaniment.’
Plex is not alone in this. It seems most players and tag editors misuse this tag in this way. Maybe this means that the ID3 spec should have a tag for ‘Album Artist,’ but currently it doesn’t.
From the ID3 v2.3 spec:
TPE1 - The 'Lead artist(s)/Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)/Performing group' is used for the main artist(s). They are separated with the "/" character.
TPE2 - The 'Band/Orchestra/Accompaniment' frame is used for additional information about the performers in the recording.
TPE3 - The 'Conductor' frame is used for the name of the conductor.
TPE4 - The 'Interpreted, remixed, or otherwise modified by' frame contains more information about the people behind a remix and similar interpretations of another existing piece.
To Plex’s defense:
The use of TPE2 as ‘Album Artist’ goes back to ‘Winamp’, which was the first mp3 player available in the first place on the DOS/Windows platform. It even had a clone on the Apple platform called MacAmp - years before there was iTunes.
@trumpy81 said:
I had an early version of Winamp on my Amiga, it wasn’t called Winamp obviously, but it was a forerunner, many years before that, although tags had not been invented then. MP3 was brand new back then too.
Damn, that dates me … :))
Ha!
I worked on an Amiga running Newtek’s Video Toaster - Yea, the Babylon 5 guys used it for the exteriors, but I’m betting their systems were a few thousand steps above ours…
I do recall having to order a hard disk from Japan - 350GB that cost more than my car and you wouldn’t believe how fast we could fill that thing up…
I get it has its own/previous used ways, but this is ludicrous. Most people would have to edit each and every song for it to work. How insane is that?
iTunes pulls Artist Information, Song, Album Art and Album info
Google Play does the same
Double Twist does the same
Plex however does not. How hard is this for Plex to fix? It seems pretty simple.
Find information in one of the few places:
a) Title
b) Album
c) Artist
If it can find enough information, Auto Tag.
a) i.e. if Title is 01-Linkin Park - In The End
b) translate to; Artist- Linkin Park, Title- In the End, (Auto pull album, art, etc)
Sorry this is exactly (to some extent) what Plex does with Movies and TV Shows, its expected to do the same.
@trumpy81 said:
Actually, you are not quite correct. The IDv3 2.3 specification states:
4.2.1 TPE1 [#TPE1 Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)]
4.2.1 TPE2 [#TPE2 Band/orchestra/accompaniment]
TPE1 is equal to Artist and TPE2 is equal to Album Artist.
I disagree. If you’ll take another look, the excerpt that I quoted came from the ID3 v2.3 spec as well. The difference is, I quoted the full description of the frames, where yours comes from the abbreviated list.
The description of TPE1 says it is for ''Lead artist(s)/Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)/Performing group"
The full description of TPE2 is:
‘The ‘Band/Orchestra/Accompaniment’ frame is used for additional information about the performers in the recording.’
You see no mention of ‘album artist’ in that definition.
As I also said, and this addresses Otto’s defense of Plex as well, Plex is not alone in this. Many tag editors and players have long been misusing the TPE2 frame for ‘album artist.’ It has been going on so long that it has become the de facto usage. But it’s still a misuse of the TPE2 frame.
The fact is, no version of the ID3 spec defines an “album artist” tag, which is what led to the misuse of TPE2. FLAC, MP4, Windows Media, and Vorbis all provide for an albumartist tag, but ID3 does not.
@tlm4594 said:
In general, aside from the misuse of the TPE2 field, in my experience Plex does a great job of reading my embedded tags. It’s terrible when it tries to use Gracenote or Last.FM, but I think that’s the fault of those services, not Plex.
Can you show us screenshots of the tags for a specific album that fails for you? A screenshot of EasyTag, for example, or the tool of your choice.
@trumpy81 said:
I had an early version of Winamp on my Amiga, it wasn’t called Winamp obviously, but it was a forerunner, many years before that, although tags had not been invented then. MP3 was brand new back then too.
Damn, that dates me … :))
Ha!
I worked on an Amiga running Newtek’s Video Toaster - Yea, the Babylon 5 guys used it for the exteriors, but I’m betting their systems were a few thousand steps above ours…
I do recall having to order a hard disk from Japan - 350GB that cost more than my car and you wouldn’t believe how fast we could fill that thing up…
350GB or 350MB… I think the latter The first hard drive I bought was like 44MB, it was either MFM or RLL (interface) and you had to buy a ISA card to install it. I think that was somewhere around 1990 and cost me over $700. That was of course a full-height 5-1/4" drive! Back when CGA/EGA were still around and VGA was what the cool kids had!
I was around and active with PC’s back then, though was till living at home (and my parents didn’t shell for the Amiga, I got a C-64 which was just fine too!). Blew the IBM-PC’s out of the water any way though eventually Commodore died and the PC was it. It’s a wonder Amiga didn’t do better.
I was around and active with PC’s back then, though was till living at home (and my parents didn’t shell for the Amiga, I got a C-64 which was just fine too!). Blew the IBM-PC’s out of the water any way though eventually Commodore died and the PC was it. It’s a wonder Amiga didn’t do better.
It probably would have if Jack hadn’t been forced to resign by Irving Gould. He probably would have stayed and not created the Atari ST, the only competitor for the Amiga at the time.
No… it was indeed 350GB. That’s why we had to order it from Japan. That Video Toaster did some amazing stuff, but it sure did eat some storage. Seems silly now.
@JuiceWSA said:
No… it was indeed 350GB. That’s why we had to order it from Japan. That Video Toaster did some amazing stuff, but it sure did eat some storage. Seems silly now.
Hmm, interesting, I thought they didn’t break the 137 GB addressing space barrier until 2002/2003 or so. Learn something new everyday.
It was a super special deal not available on US Soil just for the Amiga designed so that Video Toaster would have something big to write to. It was very expensive. '95 to '97 time frame. My Brother and 2 other guys in the company built the system then came in and set it down in front of me with an encyclopedia-manual. About 4 months and as many seminars later I looked up and we were making high end graphics…
Last year I made some pretty neat stuff in short order with ‘Blender’ and was amazed how similar the environment was and also how I was able to remember a lot of stuff from the '95 to '97 time frame… those were ‘interesting’ years.
@JuiceWSA said:
It was a super special deal not available on US Soil just for the Amiga designed so that Video Toaster would have something big to write to. It was very expensive. '95 to '97 time frame. My Brother and 2 other guys in the company built the system then came in and set it down in front of me with an encyclopedia-manual. About 4 months and as many seminars later I looked up and we were making high end graphics…
Last year I made some pretty neat stuff in short order with ‘Blender’ and was amazed how similar the environment was and also how I was able to remember a lot of stuff from the '95 to '97 time frame… those were ‘interesting’ years.
Oh, I’m sure it was VERY expensive. The largest hard drive IBM made in 1997 was the 16 GB Deskstar 16GP (which I thought was the largest hard drive made at the time, guess I was wrong) which sold for $420,000. So I am sure a 350 GB drive from Japan had to be several million.
@trumpy81 said: @rsava I believe you are thinking IDE which the Amiga did not use natively. The Amiga natively used SCSI but there were all manner of interface boards that could be used by the Amiga back then, IDE being just one of many.
The 360GB HDD would have been very expensive, although I doubt it was in the millions, more likely in thousands, probably around $5000.00 if memory serves me correctly. I do recall wanting one for my BBS, but of course I could not afford that sort of money in those days. The best I could do was a 122MB SCSI drive and it was a full height 5.25" monster at that … lol
In any case, I would love to see the Amiga revived and become a serious competitor again. I am very surprised that the Amiga OS has not been adopted into the embedded market, I think it could have done well there with a few tweaks, but for some reason, nobody likes to code in C anymore. :))
Not all Amigas used SCSI, some used IDE.
But even on the SCSI ones, you still had the size imitations of the drives. Notice that the largest SCSI sizes until 2000+ was 125GB. SCSI can handle large drives (even if the OSes couldn’t the SCSI controllers were intelligent) but they could not make drives that large, at least not for anyone other than governments or large corporations (if even them).
IBM did have a 236GB storage system back in the mid 70’s, the IBM 3850, but it used 4-inch long cylinders of magnetic tape that were retrieved and replaced by a robotic arm, so not really a “drive”.
The first GB “drive” did not come out until 1980, the IBM 3380, 2 1.26GB hard disk assemblies (it used film head technology) and was the size of a refrigerator.
Yes, you are correct, the drive I was talking about @ 420,000 was IDE and it was a 3.5" drive.
Don’t think the Amiga will ever come back, here is an interesting set of pages about Amigas: http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/
(BTW, Atari ST rules! Amiga drools! ST all the way …)
But we digress.
I believe the original topic was “Plex Music is horrendous, just being honest”, which I have to disagree with.
Is it the best? Nope, but far from horrendous. It does, in my opinion, a pretty good job.
That drive was definitely not a million dollars, but as I said it did cost more than my car and the car I was driving at that time was one I bought brand new - a 1974 Chevy Nova for $5, 370 that got 8MPG downhill with a tail wind on a good day. That at least I do remember well because at the time I was certain I was being robbed and to date I’ve not bought another new one. LOL
Oh Hail Yas… with MP3Tag, The Plex Naming Guide for Music and a couple of days I was able to turn my entire music library from a disaster zone into a fine example of either instant matches from last.fm or acceptable listings in such a way that there aren’t 1500 disassociated various artists hanging out in limbo with nowhere to call home.
@JuiceWSA said:
That drive was definitely not a million dollars, but as I said it did cost more than my car and the car I was driving at that time was one I bought brand new - a 1974 Chevy Nova for $5, 370 that got 8MPG downhill with a tail wind on a good day. That at least I do remember well because at the time I was certain I was being robbed and to date I’ve not bought another new one. LOL
Oh Hail Yas… with MP3Tag, The Plex Naming Guide for Music and a couple of days I was able to turn my entire music library from a disaster zone into a fine example of either instant matches from last.fm or acceptable listings in such a way that there aren’t 1500 disassociated various artists hanging out in limbo with nowhere to call home.
Hi Juice,
Thanks for your response, where is the Plex Naming Guide for Music? I tried googling it and what I got didn’t include MP3Tag.
MP3Tag is a program handy enough that I am amazed it doesn’t already reside in every music lover’s lineup of Go-To programs… I also use MP3Gain to great effect as well, but YMMV.
Note: MP3Tag works so well and makes placing music so fast and easy I actually look forward to it and that is a complete 180 degree turn-around from dreading the day I was eventually going to have enter the bomb crater that used to be my Music Libraries to fix them. With MP3Tag it wasn’t so bad after all.
