At the moment plex does not recognize updated file tags. For people like me managing their music library with an external program (MediaMonkey, beets, etc.) it is a real pain in the ■■■■ that changed id3/m4a tags are not recognized.
There are several discussions where people are complaining about this, but I found no existing feature requests.
This hasn’t been filed as a feature request because it has long been recognized as a bug. I tried to find the original reports of the problems surrounding refreshing libraries after metadata tags are updated, but there are so many that I found it too hard to sift through them all.
This problem has existed for so long, and has been so widely reported, that the workaround for it has acquired a name, “The Plex Dance.” I personally think an issue that has been so prevalent for so long should be highly embarrassing to Plex, but they don’t seem to care too much about it.
Is this still a problem with the latest release? I’m only just getting started with actually adding content into Plex and when I occasionally find something that requires me to edit the tags (externally in iTunes), I want ‘Refresh’ to make Plex simply re-read the tags. With “Use embedded metadata” selected for the library, that’s all it needs to do, yet the ticker tape at the bottom of the screen indicates it’s trawling the 'Net to grab data again. Huh, it should just be reading the file tags again.
I’m also struggling with album artwork. Occasionally Plex is not finding the cover.jpg image file in the correct location (alongside the tracks) and I want to be able to force Plex to basically start again with this album. Re-read the file tags and find the local artwork and offer it as a choice to be used (if more than one item).
But is this all just wishful thinking on my part? Does it never again re-read the tags or look for available local artwork?
Yeah I’ve had a lot of issues with this lately. Really needs to be fixed.
