last.fm is useless for my music library, which is a few thousand personal recordings I and my students have made. Not one commercially-released “album,” just a lot of .mp3s. Yet the last.fm plugin kicks in and sucks up all the cpu on my puny Raspberry Pi Plex server while it needlessly scans the files and phones home to find metadata. Maybe I could close off any ports that last.fm wants? Am I stuck with this stupid service?
Edit your music library
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200289266-editing-libraries/
go to the ‘Advanced’ tab
set as ‘Agent’ = ‘Personal Media Artists’
Put a check mark into ‘Use embedded tags’
see
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200265296-adding-music-media-from-folders/
and
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200381093-identifying-music-media-using-embedded-metadata/
and maybe
multi-disc albums
possible ‘side car’ files for music
Thank you.
That is how I have it set up. And yet htop (Linux) shows the last.fm plugin running and chewing up 102% (!?!) of cpu. I don’t see a way to put or attach a screencap of htop’s window directly to this reply to show, but that’s what it says. The PMS server has ground to a near-halt while the plugin is performing this useless service. I suppose at some point the plugin will give up, not finding anything useful.
as far as “bootlegs etc. […] Put as much info into the meta tags as possible,” I have thousands of these mp3s and life is far too short to spend the rest of it manually plugging in data.
No way to just disable the last.fm plugin? I’m sure it’s a swell service for 99% of users, but I ain’t one of them. Again, thank you for helping.
Delete the library you already have. The last.fm plugin is probably still busy processing that one.
Then reboot your server.
Re-create the music library, but this time make sure to visit the ‘Advanced’ tab before you click on OK.
Thank you, OttoKerner
I had to just now reinstall plexmediaserver, they pushed a new version which I installed and it broke everything, so starting over. Not a problem. Anyway, before “OK-ing” the new music library I made sure to set things up as you suggested. It’s now in “Libraries are currently being updated” mode and seems to be cheerfully downloading metadata which is exactly what I wish it would stop trying to do. I just need a folder-browser music server for cross-platform clients* without all the bells and whistles of album arts and “here, let me organize your music library” and other decorative rubbish, but maybe this is something that PMS needs to do regardless of how a fellow sets up his music library? I’ll see how this turns out.
- Roku, Android, generic browser window.
Even with the Personal Media Agent you will see ‘toasts’ about ‘Downloading metadata’. What this means though is that metadata are being read from the embedded meta tags of your files.
Thank you. Few of my mp3s have any tags, but hey – maybe they all have to be opened and examined and tested one at a time. UPDATE: according to htop, the last.fm plugin isn’t doing anything, so yay. cpu usage is high during this “hey look, we have a new library” scanning, but it’s not the last.fm plugin. Looks to be mainly the built-in Plex Media Scanner. Now – can that thing be disabled?
No, that cannot be disabled. Either you want your files be added into your audio library or not.
OK, thanks. IOW, it is what it is.
Dang – it’s taking a long time. I have 2,600 music (mp3) files in this one Library for Plex Media Scanner to sort through.
Request For Enhancement: a progress bar. Is it a third done? Nearly done? It baffles science.
Plex tries to be too “helpful” for my taste. I know what my files are, I have them organized by folder.
If I could find a Linux-based music server with player clients for Roku, Windows, and Android that didn’t feel the need to paw through all my files and try to figure out what they are I’d switch to it in a heartbeat.
Just show me the files and I’ll add them to the playback queue. Logitech Media Server is better in this regard, IMO, but its Roku client lacks folder-based browsing.
But I complain – which is not attractive. 
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