New user- trying to organize my files for plex. Movies and TV shows, no problem as instructions are clear.
Music; On plex ‘getting started’, it clearly shows music to be organized as ; music\artistname - albumname racks
However, I have seen twice now on this forum saying the proper way is ; music\artistname\albumname racks
Which is correct?
Also; proper way to list music disks that are compilations? (one disk, various artists) - would prefer for this to show up with the compiled disk tracks being grouped together as they are on the CD, and perhaps listing artists for each track name (possible?)
Lastly; proper way to list music that is not part of a disk (a single) - how does plex handle this?
Help!! 
I have no issues with my setup:
/Media/Music/Artist/Album/00. Artist Name - Track Name.ext
I don’t really bother with separating multi disk into folders as all my media is tagged.
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the first option is the recommended way.
you can usually get by with the second option if your metatags are well maintained.
If you are just starting with plex and want to reorganize your files anyway I recommend the following approach
Music
Artist
Albumartist - Albumtitle
1. trackartist - tracktitle.mp3
2. trackartist - tracktitle.mp3
...
and for a multi-disc album:
Artist
Albumartist - Albumtitle
Disc 1
1. trackartist - tracktitle.mp3
2. trackartist - tracktitle.mp3
...
Disc 2
1. trackartist - tracktitle.mp3
2. trackartist - tracktitle.mp3
...
do note the distinction between Albumartist and Trackartist.
There are separate metatags for these. You need to fill both.
This then provides a means to deal with sampler albums:
The typical sampler simply uses as Albumartist Various Artists
And that is what you should use too, since Plex treats ‘Various Artists’ a little different. (the standard album sorting mechanism is by release year, descending whereas for Various Artists it is alphabetically, ascending)
If you are on Windows, I recommend you to use mp3tag. It can read and write metatags for all the common music fileformats + mp4/m4v
It also supports deriving metatags from folder/filenames and vice versa, which is excellent for bringing your collection into shape.
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Thank you for the clarification- will now set up complete artist albums as;
music\artist\albumartist - albumtitle\xx-tracktitles ; (listing all the tracks within this folder)
Understand the setup as explained above for multidisk albums and ‘various artist’ compilations.
As I understand it so far, ‘singles’ (not associated with a CD or album) should be organized as;
music\artist\artist - tracktitle
In this way, it is possible to have singles mixed in with the folders that contain an entire album by the same artist; for example-
Full album… music\Celine Dion\Celine Dion -Falling Into You\ xx-trackname (list all tracks here)
Single track… music\Celine Dion\Celine Dion-My Love
Is that right?
No.
Singles should be added exactly the same as albums.
Whenever possible, track the single songs back to their original album or their original single release.
Plex doesn’t handle single songs without album very well.
You could make up your own ‘singles album’ for every artist, but this will get complicated in a Premium Music Library if you don’t activate ‘Use embedded tags’. And this you should only do if all your files have good internal metatags…
So you see, you should do some experimenting. Don’t let Plex loose onto your whole set of files at once, because if you have an extensive collection, scan times can reach several hours.
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Hi!
Bumping this thread. Hope that’s ok. I’m setting up mu music collection and was going to rip my CDs and put them into a folder structure.
So. The example above. Why is there a need for the track artist in the file name if the files are in a folder structure? Does it in fact matter?
Artist/
Albumartist - Albumtitle/
Disc 1/
1. trackartist - tracktitle.mp3
2. trackartist - tracktitle.mp3
Since I may not only use Plex for music playing, I am thinking to use either
tracknr - artist - album - tracktitle.ext or simply tracknr - tracktitle.ext
The Guide at https://support.plex.tv/articles/200265296-adding-music-media-from-folders/ suggests a combined artist - album folder name instead of artist/album/
What are the pros and cons?
Thanks.
As long as your files also have correct embedded meta data, it is not that important.
You can use your “extended” or the “short” file name format if you want. Just make sure that Plex can read your meta tags.
The canonical naming guide is mainly important for those cases, where the embedded meta tags cannot be read by Plex.
I do however still recommend you to stick to the Artist > Album > Tracks folder structure.
Thank you for the quick reply. This means that since I’m ripping my own CD’s I can do both proper meta data and a logical folder structure?
Of course. I very much recommend you to do that.
You can even tell Plex to prefer your embedded meta tags when ingesting your files.
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How do I do with track numbers. should I do 01, 02,...,10,11 or 1,2,...,10,11?
Also, I’m a little confused about AlbumArtist vs TrackArtist. For albums where it is the same artist throughout such as ABBA - Waterloo, should I put ABBA in both tags? `
I also have a few CD’s which are mixed albums with several artists. Both music compilations and movie sound tracks. I read somewhere here on the forum that I should use Various Artists as the AlbumArtist tag?
Lastly, Is there a tag for group members so I can add members’ names? For example Agnetha Fältskog from ABBA? Perhaps that’s really overdoing it?
I recommend to ‘pad’ them always to 2-digit. Makes it easier to scrape them programmatically with other software. But doesn’t matter to Plex that much.
If all artists on all tracks are the same, you can omit the Album Artist tag. But as soon as only one track has a different artist (even by one character), Plex could “fracture” the album.
So if you want to be on the safe side, populate always Album Artist.
Yes, this is kinda the universally agreed-upon Album Artist to use for samplers.
But you can also “invent” Album Artists for sampler albums, if it makes sense to you.
For instance you could “group” several related samplers under such an invented artist name.
If the album however has a “main” artist and all the others are just kinda contributing, then you should use the main artist as the Album Artist.
Not in Plex atm. You could however use the ‘Related Artists’ input field in Plex, but that is normally used for musically related artists.
Here are some more tips regarding music
multi-disc albums
handling singles and EP’s
possible ‘side car’ files for music
soundtracks and ‘various artists’
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Thanks. Very good information I’ll try with a subset of albums to see how Plex reads them before doing everything.
Just throwing this out there, because imo it’s a better tool, I use MusicBrainz to tag all of my music, it can lookup by cluster, by album, or if you can’t find either of those two, it will use the audio fingerprint to find it in the database. It’s a little more complicated than something like mp3tag at first, but once you watch a youtube video on how to use it, you probably won’t go back… It’s excellent
That sounds cool. How does that work? Haven’t tried that before.
MusicBrainz Picard is the name of the application. You can look it up in google and download it.
It uses the Last.fm database to tag your files. But some of its key features are pretty nifty. You can load your entire music library into it. Once you have all the files listed on the left hand side, there are a couple of options.
The first thing you wanna do from here is “Cluster” what this does is it looks at 2 things for each file, it looks at the existing MetaData, and it looks at the folder it’s in. I am unsure of which one it prioritizes, but I would place my guess on the folder.
From here, it should cluster all of your music into Album Names at the bottom of the same list on the left. If any files failed to cluster properly, we’ll get to that later.
Now, you can highlight all of the clustered files (briefly look over the list to make sure things look ok) and click the lookup button. It will then attempt to match the clusters with albums in the Last.fm database.
Once it’s done doing that, it will populate a list on the right. Gold CD’s with a red asterisk denote that all files are present, and the album was a successful match, although, I would look at the number of tracks that are supposed to be present and the number of tracks actually there, sometimes this is higher than it should be, and that’s sometimes because there is more than one album (one released in UK for instance that had extra tracks that the matched result didn’t). For these you can right click them, and go to Version and lookup the one that has the correct amount of tracks, if there’s multiple, you kind of need to know the source it came from.
Grey CD’s indicate there are missing tracks or missing videos. Go through these carefully, and if you see ones with tracks you have, use windows explorer to navigate to the folder those are in (you could right click>open folder on one of the present tracks if you wanted) and then drag from windows explorer, directly into the missing track segment of the album. Do this until it’s gold, or until you have it as complete as you possibly can (I don’t mess with the video tracks 90% of the time)
Once this list is as complete as possible, highlight everything on the right, and click save… It will retag all MP3’s and remove any erroneous and unnecessary tags that certain encoders added previously. it will also embed album artwork into the tag.
For any remaining tracks on the left side, you can click on the “Audio Fingerprint” button at the top, and it will intelligently look at the waveforms in the audio and match it to an existing song+album and move it to the right… then you can save it with the proper tags
For any remaining clusters on the left side, you can right click and look up any close matches… And then select the proper album from the list.
Hope that helps…
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Thankfully not! It uses the musicbrainz database. https://musicbrainz.org/
(There are so many errors and inconsistencies in last.fm – you don’t want to use it for your meticulously tagged collection.)
Maybe it’s the artwork it grabs from last.fm? I dunno, I saw it while I was toying around with it, thought it was pulling from Last.fm to create its own database…
It is possible that picard is querying other sources for images as well. I understand the images on MB are merely linked and not directly hosted there.
(And they kinda want to make sure to not link to copyrighted pics either, see https://blog.metabrainz.org/2019/06/25/we-were-sued-by-a-copyright-troll-and-we-prevailed/ )
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I’ve tried Picard now, and I’m not too happy with it for my workflow. Mp3tag works much better for batch processing in my case. I think Picard has some bugs, but that’s for another thread =). I guess if I had lots of unnamed random files then Picard could really help.
One thing, I have some various artists/compilation CDs. They show up fine under the Various Artists. I can also see the individual track Artists listed as such:
However, the individual artists don’t show up in the main view, so the only way to find them is to use the search function. So For example Stereo MCs from the album Abosute Dance 2 above is not listed. Is this intended function of Plex? Is there a way to have both?
This is unfortunately one of the big restrictions in Plex’ handling of music. Track artists don’t show up in the list of artists. Only Album Artists do.
