Recommendations on music scanner & agent

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
1

I’m trying to figure out what it the best music scanner & agent to use. The default is the Plex Music but there is also Plex Music Scanner / Personal Media Artists and I cannot really tell the differences between the two.

For context, I’ve created a Music Folder (I’ve never had music in plex previously) and am moving 1 album at a time, of which I’ve added approx 70 so far using the following method …

  1. In staging rename the files to match the recommended plex naming for single disk and multi disks (Adding Music Media From Folders | Plex Support).
  2. Prefer local metadata is enabled for the music library.
  3. Update tags with MusicBrainz Picard for 99% of them and EasyTAG for genre only.
  4. Copy the album from my staging folder to my music folder which is added to plex and manually scan (auto scan is disabled).
  5. Check the album gets added as I’d expect.

So far I’ve been using Plex Music scanner & agent and I’d say 80-90% of the time its okay. However I’ve noticed some oddities …

  • A album comes in unmatched but metadata exists in plex. Doing refresh and manual match sometimes works but not always. Doing a plex dance on the whole artist and their all their albums fixes this.
  • An album will be added but the artist bio and their artwork will not fetch. A force metadata refresh is needed to fix this as its not always downloaded even waiting up to 5 minutes.
  • On one occasion I ended up with the artist listed twice. Checking the xml the plex://artist was different so I plex danced the artist and their two albums fixed it. Nothing else was changed.
  • Created this Dashboard reporting play history tracks from different albums to what was actually played regarding dashboard strangeness.

The music matching seems to be more buggy than movies/tv. That media I can include ids so matching is 100% but seems like this is not working as well with music. All the music files have MusicBrainz IDs.

Will switching to the other scanner/agent help ? What do other folks use ? I’ve approx 2,000 albums which I’d eventually want to add so this level of strangeness from just small amount is a little worrying.

2

Use the former. The other one won’t get any updates and will be disabled in the future.

3

Okay, so use Plex Music and just deal with the oddities. Thanks.

4

Please report issues you see and grab the logs so I can see why things aren’t updating.

Is this artist Alice Cooper by any chance? If not could you give me the two plex guids so I can see why there are two.

5

Sure, I’ll grab the logs if if happens again. The artist was All Saints and the two albums where titled All Saints and Testament. I don’t have the GUIDS anymore as I plex danced it which fixed them up.

However, plex://artist/5d07bbfc403c6402904a5c45 is the one I current have so if you can find the second on for that artist that could be the problematic one.

What happened in that example was when I added the second album initial it created a second artist entry and I’d both listed in plex. I then plex danced the artist and both albums which combined them correctly that time.

BTW… if you have some time in the next day or two could you take a look at Dashboard reporting play history tracks from different albums to what was actually played and let me know if that is normal or some problem with how I’ve tagged stuff.

EDIT: Actually, I’ve not recycled my plex service so the logs might be helpful so I’ve attached them here for your reference.
Plex Media Server Logs_2022-07-06_15-39-48.zip (3.9 MB)

6

Issue with artwork not loading upon matching a added artist/album. This just happened for artist Asking Alexandria with album Stand Up And Scream. It was matched correctly but the artist art both for poster and background appeared blank in the plex UI. I needed for force a refresh of the artist for it to fetch the update …

Plex Media Server Logs_2022-07-06_16-29-04.zip (3.7 MB)

Its very intermittent but is happening often enough.

Edit: this might be the same as Missing album/artist arts after last update - Shield TV Pro so maybe ignore that specific issue for the now.

7

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