Plex not reflecting the metadata from the audio files

[bonnyfused]

Hi.
I’ve noticed that Plex is ignoring the metadata found in the audio files. For example, this:

gets displayed as this in Plex:

Why is this happening?
Is it possible to:

• disable auto-lookup from whatever source(s) Plex is using?
• see which sources is Plex using?
• correct the wrong information in the source Plex is using?

TIA

[OttoKerner]

1. the state of the checkbox “prefer local metatags” is crucial
2. There is a difference between Album Artist and [track] Artist.
3. In Plex you can only have one and the same AlbumArtist for all tracks of an album

[bonnyfused]

@OttoKerner

• the state of the checkbox “prefer local metatags” is crucial

Already set:

• There is a difference between Album Artist and [track] Artist.

This I knew already…

• In Plex you can only have one and the same AlbumArtist for all tracks of an album

… but this I didn’t know. This would be fine, but the point is that this specific album “Henna” is only from “Lucio Dalla”. The other artist had nothing to do with this album in its entirety. Therefore I wonder:

• why is Plex not preferring the local metadata (assuming that “local” here means “from the audio file”)?
• where is the error? As I’ve passed this album through the MusicBrainz Picard app and it actually set both the Artist and the Album Artist to “Lucio Dalla”, I don’t understand why Plex is insisting with showing “Lucio Dalla & Gianni Morandi”.

[OttoKerner]

I recommend you dragging it into mp3tag if it’s available for your platform.
Then look at the Advanced tags dialog.
There might actually be several meta tags with differing content.

[bonnyfused]

I can look into mp3tag but for macOS it’s 22 bucks and for Windows it’s free?! Is there any alternative app doing the same for macOS?

Anyway I still don’t know why Plex is not preferring the local metadata as I’ve told it to. Any explanation on this?
Actually, both of my previous questions remain unanswered…

[OttoKerner]

@bonnyfused

Anyway I still don’t know why Plex is not preferring the local metadata as I’ve told it to. Any explanation on this?

As long as you don’t know what kind of meta tags in your files, you still cannot know if there are additional meta tags in ther ewhich override the regular artist tag (the one that you can see).

@bonnyfused

I can look into mp3tag but for macOS it’s 22 bucks and for Windows it’s free?! Is there any alternative app doing the same for macOS?

I’ve heard about Subler.

[bonnyfused]

Thanks. Subler can’t handle FLAC files (which is what I have)

[bonnyfused]

I’ve found meta and I’m trying it out for 3 days.
The album I’m working on looks like this:

There’s no evidence whatsoever of “Gianni Morandi” in all this. Therefore I think Plex is not retrieving the information from the file’s metadata, but instead it is asking some online database. Looking at MusicBrainz entry, there’s also no evidence of “Gianni Morandi”:

Release “Henna” by Lucio Dalla - MusicBrainz

Plex is still convinced that the “Album Artist” is “Lucio Dalla & Gianni Morandi” - could it be that Plex looks at this as ONE artist, whereas these are two different artist (which happened to collaborate on an album once)?

[OttoKerner]

@bonnyfused

Plex is still convinced that the “Album Artist” is “Lucio Dalla & Gianni Morandi” - could it be that Plex looks at this as ONE artist, whereas these are two different artist (which happened to collaborate on an album once)?

Is this one collaboration album stored within the same subfolder as all the Lucio Dalla solo albums?

Look at the embedded meta tags of this collaboration album.
Additionally to my point 3) above, Plex can only handle one artist. Particularly when it comes to albums.
What probably happened is that this collaboration album was matched to the artist Lucio Dalla. Then the embedded “Lucio Dalla & Gianni Morandi” artist name was used to overwrite “Lucio Dalla” solo.

With collaboration albums in Plex you have to decide on one artist name to put into the AlbumArtist meta tag.
You can put both names into the [track] artist tag, so that they at least are repesented when played back. But the pairing won’t appear in the list of the labum artists in Plex.

See my example above. A collaboration album of Elton John & Leon Russel. But I have tagged it with AlbumArtist “Elton John” because it would otherwise overwrite the artist of all my other Elton John albums.

[bonnyfused]

@OttoKerner

Is this one collaboration album stored within the same subfolder as all the Lucio Dalla solo albums?

No, it’s not:

With collaboration albums in Plex you have to decide on one artist name to put into the AlbumArtist meta tag.
You can put both names into the [track] artist tag, so that they at least are repesented when played back. But the pairing won’t appear in the list of the labum artists in Plex.

I just applied this change: I set the “Album Artist” to “Lucio Dalla” and left the “Artist” for each track to “Lucio Dalla & Gianni Morandi”. After updating the meta-tags in Plex, it is still wrong.
This is MusicBrainz Picard:

I refreshed Plex and the red marked part appeared along each track (wasn’t there before):

If I edit a track, it still ignores the meta tag:

What is disturbing further, is the fact that now track 01 has turned to track 00 - even though you can clearly see in the first screenshot that the track number is 1.
What is Plex doing here???

[OttoKerner]

Perform the Plex Dance light with this collaboration album.
Further, edit the artist in Pelx and edit the artist name to only read Lucio Dalla.