Is there a way to have plex prioritize embedded musicbrainz tags over folder structure for matching both albums and artists ?
Let me give an example for why I’m asking. Lets take the artist Tina Dickow → Tina Dickow - MusicBrainz who uses both Tina Dickow and the adopted name of Tina Dico depending on the album.
Today, I added two of her albums, links below to the exact releases in Musicbrainz for both albums.
I placed these under \Tina Dico\Count to Ten (2007) [album] and \Tina Dico\In the Red (2005) [album] as the artist and album artist for both releases are Tina Dico (and my embedded tags reflected this). However, when the plex scanner finished processing both albums where unmatched.
Upon checking, I discovered she also goes under the name Tina Dickow so I renamed them both to \Tina Dickow\Count to Ten (2007) [album] and \Tina Dickow\In the Red (2005) [album]. Plex dance later and both where matched.
I have Prefer local metadata enabled and ALL my music is tagged with Musicbrainz so why does the artist or album folder name really matter?
I’d love to be able to rely on the Musicbrainz tags for the matching.
Edit: Maybe consider allowing us to add a mbid to the folder name of the album similar to what we have for TV and Movies?
Hi, So I have been fooling around with this as well. You did right by having Musicbrainz add tags. So it might have somthing to do with which scanner you are using in advanced,
The choices in Plex are: Plex Music Scanner is the older legacy which allows for Last.FM, your own personal media artists and Plex Music which reverts it to the newer Plex Music which I believe uses the standard scanner at Musicbrainz. for track recognition and should recognize your media. Check those settings. If you change them dont forget to refresh your data to see the changes.
@anon5074910 I tested this out and recreated your folders the same way with embedded tags and I got it to match just fine. Here is the screen shot from my test library.
Now to be clear. At first I did not have any tags in the files and it did not match to anything. I then In MusicBrainz I also filled in all the following tags. Not sure how many or how little of these tags you filled in but here is a snap shot of the ones I used. And it matched for me. I also dont know if maybe MusicBrainz was updated? Or someone merged the artists in the MusicBrainz database?
Last thing here is a picture of my folders and folder structure so you can see that.
I also have Picard set to pull cover art and put into folder. Not sure if this helps. But I did get it to match with those tags and your file structure.
Thanks for the time with this, I’ll need to go and try this again on my end doing a plex dance when I have a free moment. For your reference here are the tags I include in my files.
The Original Value is how I have the files named now contained in a Tina Dickow folder and it matches first time. The yellow tags, which use the name Tina Dico did not match when used and contained in the artist Tina Dico folder.
Also, could you check from your test and ensure the album itself is matched ? Use the advanced filters like this.
I do not use the “prefer local metadata” feature, so I apologize if this is me misunderstanding, but, isn’t that the thing that makes it matter?
To me, it seems like when that feature is off, folder structure should matter less. And when it is enabled, Plex should try to respect your folder structure more? Isn’t that the point of the setting?
Again, I might be very off the mark. It’s just a thought.
@anon5074910 You are correct, confirmed. I didn’t fully understand what you meant, till you suggested looking at unmatched filter. I honestly don’t ever have any in there, but I tried with some other albums and it turns out this happens for me as well on a few. I have the same exact tags as you with the prefer embedded tags. And here is a screen shot of unmatched.
I don’t know what this means though. Does it mean the tags are not being read? Does it mean that MusicBrainz data needs to be updated? Interesting though. I wonder what the fix is for this?
It’s the opposite, at least it is in my eyes. If I’ve Prefer local metadata enabled then my tags should take precedence over everything else. That’s the point I’m making in this thread. My perfectly tagged files matching exactly a release in musicbrainz end up unmatched in plex. Ideally, that should not happen and as a workaround in this example, I needed to adjust the tags and the folder structure just to get it to match.
I might run a test with Prefer local metadata disabled and see how things turn out. I’ll want to do this on a fresh/clean server to ensure clean results so will see if I can get some time to do that! Last time I done that which was a while ago (maybe 12-18 months ago) results where not great which is why I use embedded metadata.
Exactly. With my 8,000+ albums this has happened a couple of times, maybe 20 or 30 albums. It not that many overall but it enough to annoy me. I just wish I could hard code somehow a direct match between plex and musicbrainz, like I can do today with tv shows and movies using matching ids to tmdb. I’d previously been told this was done using the embedded mbid tags from musicbrainz (ID Matching and Music Libaries - #4 by drzoidberg33) but as we have shown here that is not true, or at least not always true.
Just an observation, but it looks like an edit was made recently to the artist in the musicbrainz database - could it simply be that the album is unmatched until this edit is cleared? I often find albums in unmatched when I still have open edits in musicbrainz. A few days later they match automatically with a metadata refresh.
just downloaded that album, created a folder “Tina Dico”, recreated tags in picard as per your screenshot & it matched immediately. checked in unmatched - albums - "The active filter has no matches" (i don’t use prefer local metadata though)
I still think it maybe has something to do with the artist edit in musicbrainz - the edit was made the same day you posted this thread (by a certain masterdokuro ), then the person who also tested did so whille the edit was still pending (it was only closed on 13 JAN)
Good data point, thanks. I’m not surprised by this as the embedded tags are then not used which is where the problem lies. The matching is getting messed up due to the tags.
Anyhow, thanks for confirming. Local metadata is vital for me for various reasons so unfortunately I won’t be disabling it.
), then the person who also tested did so whille the edit was still pending (it was only closed on 13 JAN)