Plex Musix Agent - event and similar artist metadata

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
1

Hey!

I understand the new agent uses musicbrainz as a central database and branches off from there to find other metadata. Does anyone know which database returns the artist photo, artist cover photo, event data and similar artists? Alot of artists (particularly underground ones) would populate this via last.fm, but I added a last.fm relationship to a band (Slabdragger) on musicbrainz expecting it to populate the old similar artist data I had for it before, but nothing is happening. Same with a band cover photo, this appears to be missing as well, but I’m not sure where this would pull from

I’m more than happy to add the missing data myself (in the interest of crowd sourced data), just cant work out where it comes from

Thanks!

2

It collects data from several sources.

And your edits on Musicbrainz will get available to Plex in the worst case after 25 hours. So don’t expect instant changes.

Your best bet for cover art would be https://fanart.tv/

Concert data come from Songkick only.

3

Do you know what those sources are so I know if I can update them at all? Given how big my library is, a large portion had to be manually matched to last.fm on the last agent. I’m expecting with the new agent all of this data to now be lost (as it already has done for some of my artists) as things progressively update. I don’t want to manually add cover art via fanart when I know the plex agent is pulling this somewhere for other artists

I added last.fm link to Slabdragger last night, but I guess I will need to wait until tomorrow to see if it’s matched these up again?

I would absolutely hate it if it was exclusively allmusic, given they have a closed database where the public can’t make additions

4

‘Related Artists’ and the ‘Style’ and ‘Mood’ tags are all from Allmusic.

5

That’s a real bummer, that’s left a large chunk of underground DIY music in the lurch when the previous agent didn’t

Thanks for your help anyway, do you know where I can send a message regarding suggestions?

6

https://forums.plex.tv/c/general/feature-suggestions

7

So I’ve noticed that the new agent seems to pull from either allmusic or last.fm after going to musicbrainz, but it seems sporadic and with no rhyme or reason which artists it seems to want to go to?

Example 1: Blind Monarch (matched to MBID: f26f06fc-02ce-44f3-bc39-0f76bb02d7df has no biography information or band picture. The MBID has no allmusic link to it, so I expect this

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Example 2: Basarabian Hills (matched to MDBI: d0aaa9d1-53f9-4772-a63a-1820975c2ea5) has biography and band picture. The MBID also has no allmusic link to it, so unsure where this is pulling from? This is the same bio as last.fm and top picture, but there is no last.fm link supplied on the MB entry.

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These are taken after i removed my old agent library, cleared trash and bundles, and rebuilt from scratch

Both artists have been updated well before 36 hours ago

Any thoughts?

8

If both allmusic and last.fm links are missing from MB, Plex will go out and lookup info on last.fm on its own.
So your results are expected.

9

How come the Blind Monarch addition hasn’t been added then from last.fm? I’d expect to see the same behaviour, but this is showing up sporadically across the board on my server

10

I don’t have all the details how it’s looking up info. Perhaps it didn’t trust the last.fm data due to the sole one single/ep listed there?

If you want to improve the likelihood of Plex getting good info, put in the links on MB. Right now there are neither last.fm nor allmusic links for Blind Monarch.

11

Ok, I’ll add the links and see if that makes any difference after 36 hours

I think you may be on to something with it linked to bands with little releases, or maybe even listener count. I’ll do some experimentation and see if I can get things to match up

12

So I have refreshed Blind Monarch again today, but nothing has changed. I ended up having to do this manually, so may need to work out a process to do this myself for all missing biography data

Another error I noticed, bands added to musicbrainz (who do not have Allmusic data) are not matching at all, despite being found by the agent (example being used is Hellbent Diehard):

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Found via “Fix Match” after being added to Musicbrainz as per KB

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Error on front end

Snippet from log files:

Oct 20, 2019 11:57:51.823 [12756] DEBUG - Auth: authenticated user 1 as destroy_musick
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:51.823 [10468] DEBUG - Request: [127.0.0.1:62095 (Loopback)] GET /status/sessions (10 live) GZIP Signed-in Token (destroy_musick)
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:51.824 [10468] DEBUG - [Now] Adding 2 sessions.
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:51.824 [6000] DEBUG - Completed: [127.0.0.1:62095] 200 GET /status/sessions (10 live) GZIP 1ms 350 bytes (pipelined: 30)
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:51.903 [12756] DEBUG - Auth: authenticated user 1 as destroy_musick
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:51.904 [2432] DEBUG - Request: [109.151.165.66:1025 (WAN)] GET /status/sessions (10 live) TLS GZIP Signed-in Token (destroy_musick)
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:51.905 [2432] DEBUG - [Now] Adding 2 sessions.
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:51.906 [6000] DEBUG - Completed: [109.151.165.66:1025] 200 GET /status/sessions (10 live) TLS GZIP 2ms 429 bytes (pipelined: 56)
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:54.971 [6000] DEBUG - Auth: authenticated user 1 as destroy_musick
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:54.972 [3032] DEBUG - Request: [127.0.0.1:62095 (Loopback)] GET /library/metadata/357571/matches?manual=1 (10 live) GZIP Signed-in Token (destroy_musick)
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:55.141 [12756] DEBUG - Completed: [127.0.0.1:62095] 200 GET /library/metadata/357571/matches?manual=1 (10 live) GZIP 169ms 1035 bytes (pipelined: 31)
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:57.892 [12756] DEBUG - Auth: authenticated user 1 as destroy_musick
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:57.892 [11068] DEBUG - Request: [127.0.0.1:62095 (Loopback)] GET /library/metadata/357571/matches?agent=tv.plex.agents.music&manual=0 (10 live) GZIP Signed-in Token (destroy_musick)
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:57.961 [6000] DEBUG - Completed: [127.0.0.1:62095] 200 GET /library/metadata/357571/matches?agent=tv.plex.agents.music&manual=0 (10 live) GZIP 68ms 940 bytes (pipelined: 32)
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:57.967 [6000] DEBUG - Auth: authenticated user 1 as destroy_musick
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:57.967 [2432] DEBUG - Request: [127.0.0.1:62095 (Loopback)] PUT /library/metadata/357571/match?guid=mbid%3A%2F%2Ff4237ba4-d79a-43e7-b286-953b9ade4beb&name=Hellbent%20Diehard (10 live) GZIP Signed-in Token (destroy_musick)
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:58.140 [2432] ERROR - Music: Processing match for GUID mbid://f4237ba4-d79a-43e7-b286-953b9ade4beb failed.
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:58.141 [12756] DEBUG - Completed: [127.0.0.1:62095] 400 PUT /library/metadata/357571/match?guid=mbid%3A%2F%2Ff4237ba4-d79a-43e7-b286-953b9ade4beb&name=Hellbent%20Diehard (10 live) GZIP 173ms 463 bytes (pipelined: 33)
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:59.500 [6000] DEBUG - Auth: authenticated user 1 as destroy_musick
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:59.500 [11068] DEBUG - Request: [109.151.165.66:1025 (WAN)] GET /:/timeline?ratingKey=329222&key=%2Flibrary%2Fmetadata%2F329222&playbackTime=85801&playQueueItemID=30122&state=paused&hasMDE=1&time=85000&duration=271000 (10 live) TLS GZIP Signed-in Token (destroy_musick)
Oct 20, 2019 11:57:59.501 [11068] DEBUG - Client [x0i4z2p4ttgtbjv9ebf9zuim] reporting timeline state paused, progress of 85000/271000ms for guid=, ratingKey=329222 url=, key=/library/metadata/329222, containerKey=, metadataId=329222, source=

Log shows mostly just an error. Should I look again in verbose mode for more info?

Each track is in the following format (which works for 98% of my library to match):

Artist[year] album\track# trackname

Any ideas why the plex/musicbrainz agent is failing to connect?

EDIT: Done a plex shuffle and still a no go :frowning:

13

So just a quick update on this based on my observations and experiments over the last couple of days.

I’ve got alot of rare music that doesn’t exist in musicbrainz. For the sake of making my collection cohesive and complete, I have been adding artists into musicbrainz that are missing and waiting 1 - 2 days before “fix match” to match them. This works absolutely fine and as stated in the documentation

What becomes curious now is if you add a last.fm relationship link on a new artist within musicbrainz. I would love it if these musicians all had allmusic links too, but that’s just not feasible given some of these were small 1 EP release bands

Anyway, what I’ve found is that if you add a last.fm link to a new artist AS you’re submitting the new artist into musicbrainz, when plex catches this in 1 - 2 days time, it will pull the metadata from last.fm as well (as stated in the thread above).

However, if you have a scenario (as I do with about 250+ artists in my library) that there is a musicbrainz link WITHOUT any metadata, you can add the last.fm link to the musicbrainz entry. I would expect in a couple of days that this relationship would then be available again, but no dice. If you add a last.fm relationship to an artist already added into musicbrainz, plex won’t update that information.

I have done this with a couple of bands now, Bastardhammer (relationship added after it was entered into the DB. Links mbid, but no metadata) and BOAK (added 2016, relationshiped added on the 18th)

I have done the plex dance, refreshed and unmatched/rematched, but they only seem to match the mbid and not use the relationship

At this stage I’m not sure if this is a bug from plex, expected behaviour, an issue with last.fm or an issue with musicbrainz. But at this stage, it just seems the only work around is to ensure you have added the relationship at the same time the artist is submitted, else plex won’t find the metadata

Any help would be appreciated, but at this stage I’m not even sure what the next steps could be

14

As a last resort, link also the “release group” on MB with the album on last.fm
I did this on a few occasions and these were picked up after a few days.

15

How did you do that? last.fm is not on the whitelist for “release group” links, so I can’t add it

16

You are right. Apparently this is only working with allmusic albums, but not with last.fm albums.
Sorry about that!

17

Ah ok, that makes sense

I’m just going to hold out if the updated relationships eventually get recognised by plex. I did notice that if you add a relationship to at artist level, musicbrainz doesn’t count this as an artist update. So I have updated an artist relationship, along with something more substantial (like a missing release) which now flags it as updated. My hope is that this triggers something in musicbrainz to update their side in a couple of days, which will then be reflected back to their API. Fingers crossed!

18

So marking the artist as updated on musicbrainz doesn’t seem to work. Kind of at a loss how I can get this to work, but I feel like it might be in vain

19

I kind of have lost track of what you are expecting to show up now.
‘related artists’ won’t show up until this band is listed on allmusic.
What are you missing now?

20

Oh it moved on from that (admittedly the title of the thread is now misleading)

It stems from the fact that plex is seemingly inconsistent with how it retrieves metadata from different sources.

If a musicbrainz entry does not have an allmusic entry (which is a VERY large chunk of underground or not-well-known musicians and artists), it should fall back on the last.fm relationship entry. This seems to be the case with musicians that have a last.fm entry before this update in plex.

If there isn’t a musicbrainz entry for a musician, you can add it in as per the kb article. If at the stage before you hit submit for the new artist you have already given it a last.fm relationship, it will pull metadata from last.fm once it becomes available in 36 hours times.

However, if you add the relationship AFTER the musician has been submitted, plex either ignores this or musicbrainz doesn’t provide it, even after waiting 2 weeks now since the relationship has been added

As allmusic is a closed off database, having entries with rich metadata for a tiny grindcore band from London is just not going to happen. However, last.fm has that crowd sourced data, but we seemingly can’t access it unless it existed as a relationship on their musicbrainz entry before the update occurred or the relationship was on the musicbrainz record when it was initially inserted