Well, I recommend it because I dislike how Plex takes in all this metadata for my songs. I used to be the same way with my movies and shows, but those are already well organized. However, my music is a hodgepodge of random songs by random people. Plex tries to organize it according to album (one song per album) or artist (usually also one song per artist).
So what used to be various “genre”-like folders, with each song in them sorted alphabetically by title, becomes one massive list of “albums” or “artists” sorted seemingly randomly, including every single song I have regardless of folder/genre separation. Not to mention, the genre tags that Plex assigns (taken from MusicBrainz or other online music metadata sites) are not an acceptable alternative to my own organization option.
Folder view in the library will still get me my music, but it does not allow queue operations on an entire folder, so my old fav of selecting a folder of folders and shuffling its contents is impossible, requiring I drill down and add every single song one by one to a queue. I suppose I could do that all once, then create a playlist of said songs in the future, but that is not my only problem with Plex and music.
Plex has an annoying habit of lumping songs together that have no album artist tag. Rather than slap on “unknown artist” or “various artists” on an unknown album, it tends to pick a random artist from my library and assign them to the album. Thus, I often end up with one artist with 29 albums to their name, maybe one song is theirs. But since it lists this artists music by [Unknown Album] with a single song in each, it is REALLY hard to see which ones belong to them or not. Look at this:
I have no option, on the artist level, of displaying a long list of songs supposedly attributed to this guy. Each of these unknown garbage albums are a random techno I picked up “somewhere” a long time ago. I’d have to do 10 minutes research just to find out who made it. The albums WITH names are some of my Video Game music that also somehow got lumped in.
Plex just has a hard time handling songs with minimal metadata. Often when I DO have a full album of songs (like a game soundtrack), but the track numbers were stripped from the title and the metadata, Plex will create one album for each song, which I will then have to work to recombine into one album.
/rant
Anyway, take what I’D do to my library to make it manageable as a stupid but workable way, not the “proper” way. But I’ll explain further: Set the album to match the folder itself. This is mainly because my music metadata is crap. Like, horrible to non-existent. In fact, I think I recently stripped all of it, because I have so many songs it’d take a week to correct, if music-brainz even has it in their detection database. In particular, video game music I’ve gotten often are remixes by completely random people that I do not care to worry about. So I feel like I ought to just Make up an album for video game music CALLED Video Game Music and force Plex to use local metadata. I don’t care that it will have no album art, no album artist, no album description, no artist description. I just want Plex to not present me 1000 different “albums” of my VG music, but rather perhaps one per game, which I can then easily queue up with one click.
To clarify, I have a folder called “Oldies”. In it is every single oldies song I found relatively kicking when I grew up listening to them. Within that is a folder or two when I happened to have more than a few songs by any one artist. Beatles, Beach Boys, etc. I plan to load it ALL up into MP3Tag, and manually set all their album tag to “Oldies”. Plex should see this and honor the tag, creating one large “Oldies” album. It’s going to have an album artist of “Various Artists” of course. Then, since Plex will list this one “album” as a few hundred “Oldies” albums (due to no track numbers), I will them combine them using Plex’s “Merge album” option, so I have one “Oldies” album. Repeat for Rock, VGMusic, Classical music, etc.
Doing this will - yes - kill artist bios and break metadata collection. I’m fine with it though. As I said above, most of my music likely has no usable metadata to find, so I’d prefer to create custom metadata ahead of time and have Plex honor it.
