Refresh of library is not picking up changed file metadata

[rjcrum]

I am so frustrated.

I am a classical music listener, and take great pains to edit my FLAC file metadata using MP3TAG to be exactly what I want it to be - composer name, artist name, work and movement titles, etc. I recently purchased some new music from Presto Music and downloaded them to my computer. I used MP3TAG to edit the metadata in my “master” files, and then copied them to my Synology NAS.

Plex picked up the new files, but I noticed that because Plex uses “Album Artist” instead of “Artist” for categorizing (WHICH I HATE!) my music was not sorting properly, and wasn’t assigning music to the proper Artist, which is always the composer in my library.

So I edited the affected files again in MP3TAG and copied them to the Synology NAS. Then in Plex, after seeing that some of those changes weren’t picked up, I forced a “Refresh” of the affected files.

I some cases Plex picked up the changed metadata, but in many, many other cases, Plex just refuses to read the changed metadata from the files!!

I ultimately did a “Refresh” of the entire library, and Plex STILL refuses to use the current metadata in the files. This has actually happened to me before, and I think after messing with it for a while I gave up and lived with incorrect metadata.

So, how can I force Plex to actually READ the metadata in a FLAC file, and use the Artist, Album Artist, Album and other tags to populate the library?

This is the metadata as seen in MP3TAG. Note the artist is Strauss, Richard:

This is what Plex displays even after a library refresh. Note the artist is Schreker, Franz:

[OttoKerner]

In order for Plex to follow your embedded meta tags, you need to enable “prefer local metadata” in the properties of the library.

But if you do that, you will have to adhere to these rules:

• each album can have only one album artist, i.e. all tracks of a certain album need to have the same album artist
• the folder hierarchy is /Music/Album Artist/Album Title, which means that you cannot store albums with differing album artists inside the same Album Artist folder.

Conflicts resulting from not adhering to the above usually require a Plex dance “light” to resolve.

[rjcrum]

The “Prefer local metadata” box was already checked.

I guess I naively thought that by checking that box, the metadata in the files would override anything else Plex was trying to do, as specified in the description “When scanning this library, prefer embedded tags and local files if present.”

Apparently, that actually comes with an asterisk “*Unless the folder hierarchy that Plex wants to see conflicts with the metadata, in which case we’ll ignore your carefully chosen metadata and just throw in what we think is best.”

Sorry for sounding snarky, but what’s the purpose of the “Local metadata” checkbox if Plex just ignores it??? That’s ridiculous.

Extracting information from the folder hierarchy in place of well-curated metadata just seems so 60’s, back when computer file systems were rather basic.

So I humbly submit this as a bug. If the “Prefer local metadata” box is checked, Plex should ONLY look at the local file metadata.

Now I’ll have to go figure out how to re-organize my files to meet the silly folder hierarchy. Not happy.

[shmish]

I agree, this is very cumbersome. Most of my music library is from Techno and House recordings. I have them sorted in folders according to the labels, not the artists. So many artists are one-offs, and these are all 12" singles. Every two or three tracks would require a new album and folder. Totally inappropriate for this library.