Plex Server Not Reading Artist, and Misreading All to Same Artist Album and Album Name

[Collectonian]

Server Version#: 1.18.2.2058
Player Version#: All

Sorry for the long post, but I want to make sure I note what I’ve already tried and to explain the issue thoroughly. My MP3s are in a directory called music, grouped by genre primarily (with a few in album folders under the genre) and are all tagged correctly with ID3v2.3 and ID3v1 tags per Mp3Tag.

I noticed some of my songs were coming up with the wrong artist name, so I checked their tags and they were all good. I hadn’t had issues before, so I presumed something was corrupted and told Plex to reread the files. That didn’t fix it. A lot of the “album” info was also wrong, even though I had previous disabled Plex pulling any album info or the like from online because 1 - it’s almost always wrong, and 2 - I don’t care one iota about albums so I rarely even have album info in my MP3s. I just care about the song by the artist.

I finally decided to just delete the library and use the opportunity to rip out all the wrong cover art Plex had also downloaded. Then I readded the library and yay, no more bad cover art, and boo, now almost every single MP3 is being read with the same album artist. Many showed as no album artist at all and jump between the same album name and the correct ones.

I quickly jumped to MP3tag, terrified I’d messed something up…and nope, all the tags looked great. I googled and read some other threads about issues reading if the file had no album artist, so I went in and added an album artist to every single MP3 and an album, even if it was just the “Single” to give it something.

I then deleted the library again and readded it again (and yes, each time I made sure to check that it should prefer local metadata and turn off all downloading I could), gave it overnight to sync…and no change! This is extremely frustrating. Most of the files haven’t even changed and it read them fine before until I readded the library. In my player on my iPad, it’s showing up convoluted from the messed up readings:

The actual tags for that song:

I thought maybe having Single as the album title messed it up, so I changed all those to be the song title + the word single, to make them unique. Deleted the library and readded yet again, and now it’s even more screwed up. sigh

I seriously don’t even get what happened - it worked fine before. Why my rescanning it caused it to go kablooey makes no sense to me. I just know it’s really frustrating and I’m left wondering if I can even continue using Plex. Is there no way to get it to just read my tags the way they are and stop trying to “guess” at what it thinks it is supposed to be? Even my fairly dumb car infotainment system is reading the MP3 tags right when I put the same tracks on a USB stick.

How do I get my Plex to make sense at this point?

[OttoKerner]

@Collectonian

. My MP3s are in a directory called music, grouped by genre primarily (with a few in album folders under the genre)

This is your main problem.

Plex needs a folder structure
Music - Artist - Album - Songs

Putting tracks from several albums by several artists into the same folder doesn’t work.

You could tell mp3tag to fix that for you. (Using the “convert tags > file name” feature)

[Collectonian]

Hmm… So did something change on Plex because it never had an issue with my folder structure before? The issues only cropped up after the most recent server update or two.

Do you know if that is something that Plex intends to keep that way, because they shouldn’t care about my folder structure. It should just read my tags like any other proper music player.

I abhor that sort of structure, so if Plex is now changing to care more about their idea of what folder structure to use versus just reading and using the actual tagged metadata, that then I’ll definitely need to look for an alternative.

[OttoKerner]

@Collectonian

So did something change on Plex

Yes, the music support was completely overhauled. It now uses musicbrainz.org as the main data source.

@Collectonian

Do you know if that is something that Plex intends to keep that way

I cannot tell you about future plans of Plex, but in the short term this will probably stay as it is.

[Collectonian]

I found this thread on rolling back Plex and was able to roll back to 1.16 which fixed my library at least back to a usable version.

I really hope Plex will reconsider the stance on the changes made with 1.18 though. I have liked using it up until then.

[certuna]

The new scanner has some good things but yes there’s still a couple of very annoying bugs, I expect that when these are fixed we don’t need these folder-structure workarounds anymore. But until then, there’s not much you can do.

[Lyman-DeKoquonut]

I have 8900 mp3’s - all tagged with album covers. There is no way I am going to create hundreds of folders, possibly a couple thousand, and divide my collection up that way just for the one program that can’t just read the tags and call it good.

PLEX: that was a HUGE step backwards.

[Collectonian]

Highly agree. For now, I’m sticking with an older version and just not updating my mobile apps, though it really sucks Plex hasn’t fixed this yet.