Really no way to just point PMS to a giant folder of unsorted (but properly tagged) music?

General Discussions
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Google Play Music is going away soon, so I’m finally biting the bullet and doing what I’ve been wanting to do for years - host my own music. After some research, I landed on PLEX, because it seems the most mature, stable option around (“the most” meaning lightyears ahead of anything else I’ve found, not just “at least marginally better”).

Within an hour of installing it, I was positive I was going to buy the lifetime membership option, it’s that slick. However I noticed that a lot of my album art and album names were incorrect (on albums that I KNOW are tagged correctly). I investigated and soon found a lot of posts with similar issues, all concluding that the user should visit and follow the instructions here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200265296-adding-music-media-from-folders/#toc-0 , where the docs say:

If your content already has (accurate) embedded metadata, then Plex will use that information to help matching in a default install. We also make use of sonic fingerprinting to assist with matching content. Even so, it’s important to organize and name the content appropriately for the best experience.

Content should have each artist in their own directory, with each album as a separate subdirectory within it.

Music/ArtistName/AlbumName/TrackNumber - TrackName.ext

…

Tip!: Even if your music content has complete and perfect embedded tags, we strongly encourage you to continue organizing tracks into albums. Using a flat file list of tracks can result in failures or a poor experience.

Running across this I’m going from “shut-up-and-take-my-money!” to hesitating really quickly. I have several directories of music, each with maybe a thousand tracks in it. The tracks are flat, with no subdirectories, but they are meticulously tagged with Artist/AlbumArtist/Album/Track ID3 tags the way I want it organized in my player. The majority are track which are one-off, not whole albums.

Is Plex really not capable of handling this properly? Most discussions I’ve read have concluded with something along the lines of, “Eh yeah it’s annoying, but just spend the time sorting everything into folders and Plex will be happy.”

I’m so far 100% happy with everything else in Plex, but this ONE THING is super aggravating. I don’t want my music player/server to dictate my folder structure.

I’m comfortable with Bash scripting, so one option I see is to write a script to duplicate my whole music library, with the second copy reflecting the structure which Plex seems to want. But this seems like an extreme option which I would rather avoid.

Is there anything I can do to coax Plex to be happy with these flat folders I have? If any of the following is helpful:

  • I don’t care about any “matching” of tracks to online sources
  • I don’t want any online information pulled into my database (lyrics, updated metadata or album art, etc)
  • I’m ONLY using Plex for music - I have zero use for videos/tv shows/etc.

Plex seems like such a beast in every other way, I’m excited to start using it. But I’d like to find the right way to resolve this first.

Thanks for any help/suggestions!

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It makes no sense to me either, but currently there is no way to get Plex to deal with a flat folder structure. They re-wrote the Plex Music agent last year to be much more accurate in dealing with embedded metadata (and it was a great improvement, eliminating some serious bugs), but for reasons passing understanding, it actually became more dependent on the folder structure. :man_shrugging:

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That’s too bad. It really feels like someone’s offering me a Ferrari for $1000, with the catch that it only turns left. And everyone I talk to is like “Oh yeah, I know that’s annoying, but if you just plan your routes correctly ahead-of-time, it’s not that big of a deal.” Like, hey, this thing seems like 1000% awesome, but that ONE thing they haven’t resolved?

To be honest I’m probably just going to suck it up, buy the lifetime membership anyway, but daggum. It’s more than just a little annoyance.

Anyway, thanks for the reply!

5

If your tags are actually all correct it should be pretty easy to write a script to automatically do this folder sorting for you. For example, if they are all flac files you can use metaflac to pull artist/album from the tags and move the files around. Something like

for track in *.flac; do artist=$(metaflac --show-tag=Artist "$track" | awk -F "=" '{print $2}'); album=$(metaflac --show-tag=Album "$track" | awk -F "=" '{print $2}'); echo "$artist/$album/$track"; done
Mallrat/Driving Music/01 - Intro.flac
Mallrat/Driving Music/02 - Drive Me Round.flac
Mallrat/Driving Music/03 - Circles.flac
Mallrat/Driving Music/04 - When I Get My Braces Off.flac
Mallrat/Driving Music/05 - Charlie.flac
Mallrat/Driving Music/06 - Stay.flac

(except mkdir and mv instead of just an echo)

There are probably also off-the-shelf tools to do this as well.

I guess if you for some reason want all of your files in a huge flat dir that is another thing.

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Yes, getting them into the correct structure is not a problem. Mine are virtually all MP3, and I have the “eyed3” library installed, which would work great. However I do want to retain my flat structure. The annoyance is in having my music player/streamer dictate the folder structure. I’m just surprised that folks seem fine with “just do it Plex’s way” - It’s a media streamer, you’d think that “here’s a folder, serve it up for me” would be it’s bread-and-butter functionality (especially if the media has been meticulously tagged with metadata).

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You’ve just invented Italian Nascar.

… I’ll see myself out.

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I’m not a Plex professional by any means, but in theory, if you’re 100% sure all your files are tagged correctly, I would think you should be able to have Plex use the ID3 Tag data from your local media to sort and fill using the information that is embedded in your music. If it does work, it isn’t going to work perfectly, but I think it’s going to get you as close to what you want as you can possibly get without doing some actual sorting.

First, make sure your Music library is set to grab the embedded data from your music by editing your library settings, found here:

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Next, Advanced tab, check the box to prefer local metadata:

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Genres: Embedded Tags, Album Art: Your Choice, I elect to use both…
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Lastly, I don’t know if this will make a difference or not, but in the Agents section of settings, drag “Local Media Assets” to the top of the list under Albums. You will want to do this for all 3 sub-sections.

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Then back under your music library, have Plex Refresh All Metadata. See how that works out for you.
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Cool, thanks for the recommendation! I’ll give it a shot tomorrow.

And FWIW, I went ahead and bought the Lifetime Pass membership today - I didn’t want this to sound like I hate PMS - I really do like it so far. Just hoping I can get my music organized the way I want, too. :slight_smile:

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I missed one thing in my post. It was late and I was going through it a bit fast. You not only want to make the “Local Media Assets” change under ALBUM, but also under ARTIST.

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Again, I hope this accomplishes what you are looking for. It’s about all I could come up with for your situation.

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This is just silly, why not just have the option to use the tags many of us have spent lot’s of time making right? I have 100’s of single tracks that I do not want to create artist/album folders for. This is a common practice by many media players/servers to use the tags.

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Yeah, it really seems like a glaring gap. :-\ Like, this isn’t some corner-case “BOOO! Why can’t product XYZ accommodate my weird use-case??!” This is the sort of meat-and-potatoes functionality that a media server should excel at.

It’s aggravating because so far I love EVERYTHING ELSE about Plex.

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It was just a suggestion for people who are in this situation who don’t actually care how their media is organized on-disk 🤷

Personally, Plex is the only media player I use for local content, so Plex being able to read my files is the only thing I really care about. I just figured there were people with flat directories of music that cared as little as I do about the on-disk organization, so I demonstrated one possible solution.

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Agreed, and for me with the recent Google music switch to YouTube music I can no longer stream my library using car play unless I pay for a monthly premium service. I am Plex pass subscriber, really like the PLEX player, and the fact that PLEX has a car play app make it very enticing, however it is unusable with my current library

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I tried it and it didn’t seem to work. I have deleted the library and am starting over. Hopefully it’ll use my tags this time around.

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Hope you didn’t think I was annoyed at you at all. It’s a legit workaround (and in fact that’s close to what I wound up doing).

The rest is just airing frustrations at the app.

Thanks!

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not at all… thanks for the suggestion. If it works I’ll be very happy :slight_smile:

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FYI… Those settings change nothing for me… :frowning:

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I guess for now I will conform because it is the quickest path to the desired outcome. For anyone interested I used foobar2000 to move my files in to artist/album folder structure.

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Hey, didn’t realize Foobar2000 could do that. Cool.