Is there an issue with the Record Label functionality of Plex Music metadata agent?
I’ve been noticing several albums tagged with seemingly random records labels, often re-issue labels and distributors and labels from releases listed under bootleg in MusicBrainz.
Example - the first three Anathema albums, all released by Peaceville are tagged:
Plex has an algorithm that compares whatever information it can glean from your files and tries to find the most likely match from Musicbrainz. It isn’t just the first one it encounters.
The best way to ensure the most accurate automatic matching (if you aren’t preferring local metadata) is to make sure your file/folder structure meets Plex’s recommendations.
If Plex still finds the incorrect match, and you know the correct match exists on Musicbrainz, this guide may help.
The tips at the end of this page mention how you can use ID numbers from IMDB or TVDB to manually define the correct match for movies or TV shows. This trick also works with music, using Musicbrainz’s MBID. I’ve found this to be very useful.
Thank you. I’m familiar with those support articles and matching is not an issue.
Prefer local metadata is unchecked.
All music is well tagged and organised Music/Album Artist Name/YYYY - Album Title/## - Track Title.ext
Where “YYYY” is the original release year of the release group and Album Title may be followed by “(YYYY)” where “YYYY” is the release year and any additional disambiguation information, where relevant, inside square brackets.
I have tried various combinations of Refresh Metadata/Fix Match…/Unmatch/Match… on offending albums and associated album artists without success.
I stumbled across Nirvana - Bleach, which had been populated with record label “Octave”, and performed the Plex Dance which has corrected the record label to “Sub Pop Records”.
I am really hoping there is an alternative due to the noise generated by the Plex Dance and how widespread this appears to be in my library.
Load some of these files in MusicBrainz Picard or another tag editor - if they have a musicbrainz id stored that corresponds to a Russian issue, Plex will pick that up.
This is not the behaviour I’ve observed, nor is it expected, and is contrary to that observed by others:
Following a Refresh All Metadata on PMS version 1.23.0.4459 - Anathema - Serenades (1993) is now correctly using Peaceville. Several other albums, including the other two Anathema albums above, are still attributed by Plex with inaccurate record labels.
A particularly egregious example is Music on Vinyl (re-issue imprint with earliest release in MusicBrainz from 2009) which Plex has used for the following:
