I have several music cd and I want to play them on my iphone. I used to transfer them using itunes on my windows laptop. I use windows 10 and I have encountered several errors. I am now considering using Plex. I already have an extensive movie library but I don’t know how to start with music. I can’t seem to find the relevant help either. Itunes on my laptop now has several albums but they are in M4a format. What formats are compatible with plex? Guidance please? Thank you
Here you go:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/categories/your-media/naming-and-organizing-music-media/
Plex is perfectly capable to deal with mp4/m4a format audio files.
Thank you very much
A few things that may help…
You MUST follow the organization rules in that link. Plex is super picky about music. If you don’t follow the rules you will probably have a lot of problems and the first thing you’ll be told when you seek help is, “follow the rules.”
Files should all have a SINGLE “Album Artist” tag. You can put multiple names in “Artist” with a null separator. (How to do that depends on your tagging software. It is \\ in mp3tag.)
Compilations should always use the special “Album Artist” name “Various Artists.”
This means that Plex is not great for loose singles and other kinds of music that don’t match a “real” music release. You can kind of work around that by making up a custom Album Artist. For example all my DJ mixes are in some fake albums I made under the “Album Artist” name “DJ Mixes.”
Plex is happiest when it can look up the release info on MusicBrainz, so the gold standard procedure when you add an album that Plex does not know is to be a boog citizen and contribute that info to MusicBrainz.
Not everyone’s music collection can be arranged to Plex’s liking, but if you can do it Plex’s way you will have a very good experience.
can I just clarify, I have a folder with the artist name. Inside that folder, for example, I have 10 albums each with 10 songs. So do I have to have 10 sufolders each with 10 songs?
Correct!
I was thrown off, because I put some 3 albums into the artist folder, with no sub folders and it worked fine. Then I put the 3rd in and the 3rd wasn’t recognised. I will address my error. Thank you.
I have just noticed that the last album is Works Live [Disc 1] & Works Live [Disc 2] I am going to create one sub folder called works live and then enter both disc one and 2 into that folder. Would you agree with this method? I am a little autistic and sometimes struggle with grasping exact methods. Thank you for your patience.
Oh Wow!!! And there we have it!!! It has now recognised the album which had previously slipped under the radar!! I have such a sense of achievement!! Thank you! The unrecognised album was one where I had to manually enter all the metadata to every song. (Very tedious!)
It’s a good strategy. You should then adapt the track numbers in the file names and prefix the disc number to them.
However: this is not the best for box sets with hundreds of tracks in them. For these, I still recommend using
/Music
/Artist
/Album
/Disc 1
/Disc 2
01 - track title.mp3
It shoudn’t pose any problems in Plex.
However, I’d recommend to put another separation character (instead of a space) between the track number and the track title.
It makes it easier to parse the file names with a script and extract data from them, like you could do with e.g. mp3tag to use them in meta tags or other things.
I for one don’t use a separator between disc and track number.
Track numbers are typically only 2-digits, so anything in front must be a disc number.
so put a dash between the “1-01” and “Introductory Fanfare”:
1-01-Introductory fanfare
“disc number”-“Track number”-“Track name”
?
Many Thanks
Yes, that would be my recommendation.
You can get away with breaking the rules sometimes, until you can’t. Plex is just like that.
For multidisc I put them all in one folder. I put the disc number as a leading digit on the track number.
101 - Artist - Album - Disc 1 Track 1 title.mp3
etc
201 - Artist - Album - Disc 2 Track 1 title.mp3
etc
If it is a huge boxed set, do like @OttoKerner said.
This can help.
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