Can anyone tell me where the issue is? what is plex stalling on? I’m not sure how to read my logs.
Also does plex like certain music files over others? does it prefer music in separate artist folders or all in one big folder?
In theory, Plex treats all supported music formats equally (there are one or two minor bugs in that area that I know of).
As for folder structure, these help pages will show you what you need to know.
@beckfield said:
In theory, Plex treats all supported music formats equally (there are one or two minor bugs in that area that I know of).As for folder structure, these help pages will show you what you need to know.
OH NO!! I’ve actually been destroying my folders and filebotting everything into one big folder… so it would rather have Artist - Album rather than Music and then a ton of labeled tracks?
Well, it kind of depends. If your embedded ID3 tags are in good shape, and Plex is configured to prefer those, the folder structure isn’t nearly as important. If not using embedded tags, then Plex gets the artist name and album name by parsing the folder structure, generally speaking, so the folder structure kinda has to be predictable.
I have to rush off for an appointment, or I’d go into more detail. Maybe later, if needed.
@trumpy81 said:
Since you are using a Premium Music library, I would highly recommend that you use embedded tags. Gracenote can be a bit ho-hum when it comes to matching your music, but if you have the required tags and you have ‘use embedded tags’ enabled in your library settings then things will run a bit better.Without proper tags you will get a truck load of these errors (which you have):
Mar 15, 2017 16:25:12.834 [8868] ERROR - Error getting album result: 0x10820003 (Item not found)
The minimum tags for Plex are:
Artist
Album Artist … (Leave blank for Various Artist albums only, all other tracks MUST contain this tag)
Album
Title
Year
Genre
Track Number
Cover ArtYou can add any other tags if you wish, but Plex may not use them.
It also helps if you do organise your music by placing your files in an Artist folder, then an album folder, like so:
Media
…|_ Music
…|_ Pink Floyd
…|_ Pink Floyd - 1967 - The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn
…|_ Pink Floyd - 01 - Astronomy Domine.flac
…Naming is somewhat flexible in Plex for music files, but do try to follow the Plex naming guidelines for the best results.
Also, if you are adding a lot of music to your library, it can be very slow to complete. It is best to try adding one album at first, then after that has completed (assuming there are no issues with Plex) you can add the rest of your music. It will still take time to add the music though.
MP3tag is a good program to use for tagging your files and it’s free.
Isn’t MP3 tag manual? Is there a program like filebot that guesses what everything is for me and assigns it meta data? My library is massive. Also how are you finding the errors? Where do I look?
Edit:'also with the error you linked… how do I resolve a folder that isn’t there??
@trumpy81 said:
The ‘item not found’ in this case is the album tag, it is not a physical file. If the tag is available, then Gracenote cannot make sense of it for some reason.You can try Musicbrainz Picard, but I did not have very good success with that, maybe I was just holding my tongue wrong or something as a lot of people seem to have success with it … lol
Anyhow, I use Tag & Rename which is a commercial program to do all of my tagging with. You can load the file names etc. from the FreeDB or from Amazon/TrackType.org, but generally I don’t bother using them and I prefer to research my titles etc. with Google.
You will find errors all over the place, but unless you know what they mean, then you may find yourself going down the rabbit hole. First place to check though is the Plex Media Server.log and it’s numbered log files.
Dam either way this sounds like its gonna take some work to tackle a big library. You’re kinda making it sound like purging anything that isn’t pristine quality is the only realistic method here.
I agree with Trumpy, good, accurate embedded tags are far more reliable. Using a tagger like Picard or one of the others can get you started, but they depend on the same online metadata databases, like Gracenote, or Last.FM, or others, that Plex does. In my experience, they are all fraught with errors, especially for classical music. It may be easier to let one of them tag your library, but you will still have to go through and manually correct errors. That would be a smaller job than manually tagging your entire library, but, yes, no matter which way you go, there will be a significant amount of up-front work to get it done.
It took me several months, working a piece at a time as Trumpy suggests, to get my 6,000 - 7,000 tracks whipped into ID3 shape. Once done, though, it’s just a matter of keeping up with new albums that I add, Plex catalogs them very predictably, and the folder structure matters pretty much not at all.
