Recognise Local Music Meta

[alexb148]

Hello, I’ve been struggling for a while with how to get Plex to recognise local music meta data. As in local music files that aren’t in any database, but the files should have all the embedded meta data needed.

Plex just displays them as [Unknown Artist] [Unknown Album]. It seems to pick up the file name, but that’s it.

The music is all organised locally by iTunes/Apple Music, and has all the right metadata there. The music is automatically managed by Apple, which sorts it into correct artist and album folders and names the files with track numbers etc.

I have ticked “prefer local metadata” in the library settings. But Plex somehow isn’t reading this data. I have to populate it all manually for every track, which is quite tedious. Even track numbers etc.

Is Plex just incapable of this? Is it incompatible with the way Apple organises music files? Does it not work with certain file formats? (I think there’s a mix of mp3, m4a, wav).

Thanks for any help!

Server Version#: 1.25.5.5492

[beckfield]

Plex certainly doesn’t read tags from .wav files, as there is no set standard for those tags. I’m not sure about .m4a.

Plex does read some embedded tags in .mp3 files, but there are some limitations. iTunes may store some tags in a way that Plex doesn’t like (track “1/10” instead of just “1” for example).

See this How-To for some things to troubleshoot.