Server Version#: 1.22.3.4392
Player Version#: 4.56.4
I have a custom album in my library for which I want to use its embedded metadata. This is something I have never been able to make work in Plex. It simply refuses to use these metadata.
When I go to Edit Library → Advanced, I have both Prefer Local Metadata ticked and Album Art set to Local Files Only, yet they seem to do nothing at all. When I add my album – which has embedded album art as well as genre tags – the album art changes to that of the artist, and there are no genre tags to be seen in the files.
Did you figure out the problem and get this to work?
I added a few albums recently and can’t get the embedded album art to work for about half the new albums, which is annoying when some are a deluxe album with a different cover.
I switched it to the (old?) Plex Media Scanner and said only to use local files and that at least gave me NO album art for the ones that I was having trouble with. Going through and looking what makes a difference between the group that works and the group that doesn’t and I don’t notice a pattern except that it doesn’t like Michael Buble and Beyonce because I have them with the accents in the artist names so they have the accents in the folder names as well.
Sizes of the album art varies from 355x355 to 1500x1500, 6k to 2MB, labeled “front cover” and labeled “unspecified”. There’s some of those in each group so I don’t see a pattern with them.
I keep trying different stuff and then testing by doing the Plex Dance or just refreshing meta data and nothing works unless I switch to the Plex Music scanner and then it brings its old wrong art back.
Yup, that sounds on brand. No one at Plex sees it as a PROBLEM that Plex is inflexible. “You need to conform your data to Plex. Plex doesn’t conform to your data.” Maybe I can’t make those changes because I have this same music on a network share and it’s also being used by an equally inflexible media player. (It is on a network share, but I’m making up a program that’s equally inflexible. Plex is the gold standard there)
It’s just weird that every music player and service I’ve ever tried this on has worked with them no problem. Several music player, Twonky, at one time these same files were uploaded to Google Play Music and there was no problem with them. But over at Plex this isn’t even considered a bug I guess
Edit: I’ve also noticed that I make angrier posts here as I try to use Plex more. Not a great sign for any product. I used to have a bunch of movies in there for the kids on a NUC that I could take in the car on vacation and didn’t mind it so much. I was pretty happy with it. Now I’m trying to use features like the DVR and Plexamp/Music and just getting aggravated and upset pulling hair out trying to get it to fit into my life. Mostly because I see ancient forum posts for feature requests and bug reports that would have fixed the problem but now are in locked threads with no answer or solution.
I think I figured out two problems with the media that Plex has issues with. First, if the path names have any extended characters with accents like “Beyoncé” it doesn’t work well. At least in that Plex Media Scanner. The second is that it doesn’t like multiple artists on a track in ID3v2.4. It’s fine with them in ID3v2.3, but fails with ID3v2.4. Not a big deal. I can convert the few recent albums in 2.4 over to 2.3.
Edit: oh and also some of the song titles that get pulled down have a Unicode apostrophe instead of the normal one on the keyboard. If those make it into a filename then I get problems. After I fixed all these issues, I had no problems with metadata in Plex
