The music library relies so heavily on mp3 tags which is a complete pain as we all know large libraries compiled from all over, the tags are half the times wrong, garbage info, or missing etc. Is there a way to have the music library use the filename and or folder structure to determine artist and title then use a data base to find the info such as album, date and all the rest of the tags that throw my music library off, I have around 300 gigs of music and what I have been having to do is take an individual artists album, make sure its tagged correctly and move it over to plex music folder, this will take years or decades to complete.
the video and tv shows work very well, it picks up seasons from filename like xxxxxs01e01xxxx and as long as the folder is the name of the season and the parent folder is the name of the tv show it works perfect, occasionally with a movie or tv show you have to put the date on the file or folder to make sure it picks the right one up.
I have every artist folders and albums underneath them and a various folder for unknown ones, it would be nice for it to pick up on that and even find the album for my tracks I don't know the album for. any way to do this? to prevent it from looking at tags?
The Gracenote feature is supposed to fix this and fingerprint the files instead (or besides, depending on configuration, some actually have loads of tags). I had the same issue as you and didn't use the standard Plex Music feature since it just became a big mess when I added it all to that.. but with the new feature it has worked very well. If you have a good folder structure I can't see how it shouldn't work for you as well. I'm for from a representative for Plex but I suspect that they would probably want logs from when you scanned your premium music folder and it missed out on so many as you suggest. Check the help pages and see if you can't provide those :)
It sounds to me like you didnt create a PREMIUM music library, or maybe left use tags ticked? I have a large library of fairly well tagged media and I have pulled it into a Premium and a normal library just so I can look for tag differences via the backend db to correct my tags. Premium definately goes for Gracenote data over tags with the right settings (well the windows server does). Gracenote isnt perfect but is a lot better than nothing or poor data. Its pretty good at working out the correct album from folders of media too so it sounds like it would do what you need. Premium does give you other goodies too, which is nice, but if you really want to just get the data as structured in your files you could use a tagging program like the godfather, or mp3 tag studio, to retag your media based on data extracted from the filenames and folders. If your files are truly “structured” in naming its pretty easy to do but I think the premium library should be what you are looking for?
the library is so huge managing folder structures is near impossible, i have it by 0, a , b , c etc, then by artist name, but after that there are a lot of tracks that have no album and i have in an “other” folder. i have given up trying to parse this entire library and have used media monkey to detect and fix tags on albums, or songs themselves and then use the organize folder structure option in MM to make copies to my plex media server in the format music\artist\album"track" and this seems to work well, the tags are right and the structure is nice, the premium feature works very well this way, ive just been having to pick my favorites and start working on them little by little.
I ended up doing the same as you. Gracenote and Last.FM were both so unreliable, for all music, but especially for classical music, that I gave up on them and spent several weeks getting the embedded tags correct. Fortunately my library isn’t as extensive as it is for many, so it was only a few weeks’ work. Hasn’t been a headache since.
