Server Version#: 1.20.5.3600 (Windows)
I’m not new to Plex and very familiar with the correct file structure for a Music library and the correct server and agent settings to prefer local metadata and album art. I’m helping a friend add his library to Plex and running into a hurdle with album art.
This is a fairly large library (350,000+ tracks over 35,000 albums) and up to now we’ve been on versions from the 1.17 family because I was hesitant to move into the new Plex Music scanner and agent as well as the upgraded library features. (If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, I thought.)
However I finally took the plunge.
Here’s my situation:
- Primary library managed in iTunes with iTunes set to keep library files in order
- All files are MP3 format, all have correct tags, and all have embedded album art that is identical across every track in the album folder
- Folder and file structure and naming are 100% consistent and per Plex guidelines
- Everything is set to prefer local metadata for all possible settings where that’s an option
- Local Media Assets is at the top of the list for all agents
- Scanner and Agent are both Plex Music
My problem is that my friend is a huge music nerd, and often has 4 or 5 distinct versions of the same album title. For example, if we dig into Depeche Mode (don’t judge!), we find this:
Everything Counts [U.K. Ltd. Edition 12_]
Everything Counts [Absolut Mix] [U.K. Ltd. Edition 12_]
Everything Counts [Live] [U.S. 12_]
Everything Counts [U.K. 7_]
Everything Counts [U.K. 12_]
(Now, I’m aware that Plex treats everything in square brackets as extraneous information, but my friend has used brackets for 10 years and I don’t see him switching to parentheses for 35K+ album folders, unfortunately.)
- When I scan those albums, whichever one is scanned first will generally get the correct artwork extracted from the the MP3 file(s).
- The others generally don’t get artwork.
- If I edit the Album and look at the Posters tab, a cover image will be in there but it will NOT be the image that’s embedded in the MP3 files for that album; it will be from one of the other albums with the same name.
My assumption is that Plex is just treating all versions of “Everything Counts” as the same album, and getting confused when it starts to extract different images.
Okay, I thought, I will put a dedicated poster in PNG format in every album folder as cover.png. Surely that will work.
But nope — same problem. Some other data points:
- If stay on version 1.20.5.3600 and switch Scanner to the legacy scanner and Agent to Last.fm, it has the same behavior as the Plex Music agent; artwork doesn’t get loaded for albums with same title but different bracketed information.
- If I switch the agent to Personal Media Artists/Albums, it will scan all the art correctly. But then I don’t get Artist images and bios downloaded, of course.
- If I revert back to version 1.17.0.1841 (which I have stayed on for over a year), everything scans correctly.
I would think that because the folders and files are organized correctly and all tags and embedded artwork are correct that the Agent could figure out which cover goes with which album, but it just seems that it doesn’t pay attention to that data and just gets hung up on “all these album titles look too similar; I can’t figure it out.” 
So Plex gurus, any insight as to whether there might be a fix for this? It’s definitely a bug in the scanner, but I know there are similar issues with “disappearing artwork,” so I don’t know how much mindshare I could expect from the Plex team to prioritize fixing this. I assume I’m in the definite minority of people who want ONLY their painfully curated artwork to be used, but who would still like the benefit of artist bios, lyrics, etc.
Help! 
