I understand that many users love the Popular Tracks information that is provided in Plex. I don’t.
Is there any way to get rid of it?
Yes, this Help page (found with a search for “popular tracks”) shows you how.
Unfortunately, there are a few bugs in the system that prevent this from working immediately. After changing the setting, you’ll have to do the “Plex Dance.”
I followed the instructions on the recommended Help Page and set up a new music library. It has now replaced my carefully thought out library and replaced it with one of its own that is completely irrelevant and will take me many, many hours to redo.
Is there any way to go back to my earlier library?
Did you erase your old music library?!!
If you did, the only chance is to reinstate one of the automatic database backups.
Depending on whether you did a ‘clean bundles’ or not (you better not do it!) the chances are quite good to get to a working library.
Although you will lose all library changes from the last week or so.
Fortunately, I have only just started learning how Plex works with a dummy run of around 20 works, so I have not lost too much, except time. Thanks for your helpful advice.
Apart from the incredibly annoying addition of Popular Tracks, my biggest problem at the moment is that the Plex model does not seem to be well suited to classical music. It insists that the artist is the lead musician or conductor. Well, that is not the case for me. I have my music in folders that follow a schema of Media/Music/Composer/Work/Conductor - Orchestra/track title.flac.
Is there any way that I can convince Plex that the artist is whoever I say it is, not what the application thinks it should be and that if I have to rebuild the library for some reason it will retain the schema that I have established, not what it thinks is correct?
@nicholson2002 said:
Is there any way that I can convince Plex that the artist is whoever I say it is, not what the application thinks it should be and that if I have to rebuild the library for some reason it will retain the schema that I have established, not what it thinks is correct?
Unfortunately not.
I agree, Plex does not support the ID3 tags that would make dealing with Composers, Orchestras, and classical music much better.
There are some feature requests for improving Plex’s handling of ID3 tags for classical music. Please add your votes by clicking ‘Like’ on the first post in these threads:
So this thread is a year old now, and there is still no way to turn off popular tracks.
On a side note, where does my PMS get popular tracks information from? It’s not from the number of times I play the tracks because the number 2 item on the popular tracks list is from an album that I’ve never played (only just added it), therefore I can only assume that the Plex mother-ship is collecting ‘track played’ information from us all and saving it in their databases somewhere; I don’t remember being asked if they could do this?!
No, Plex does not collect which artist, song, album, movie, series etc. you play from your server.
‘Popular Tracks’ are downloaded from last.fm and are therefore generated from all last.fm users who ‘scrobble’ their playbacks there.
Disabling popular tracks will also render the new library ‘Radios’ unusable.
(currently only available on Roku and Plexamp, but slated for release in other clients as well.)
