It’s in no fit state for public consumption, but it’s a small C# app that I wrote that does the following:
Runs a SQL query on the plex DB server to find artists i want to have last.fm artist recc’s (i did flutter between artists with no recommended artists from allmusic, or anyone less than 10)
Once it has those, it will make a last.fm query on the artists.similar API with the artist name, return the first 30 results and put them into an array
Insert into the plex DB directly as a new metadata item against the original artist
Obviously there is some nuance involved, but that’s the basic workflow
The app is just a small console application that does some basic music library related tasks for me, like the above, giving me a quick list of artists that are not matched, or artists with no biography data so I can update it via musicbrainz/last.fm
The new allmusic integration is great but only for mainstream artists. The last.fm data is much more comphrensive for underground/lesser known musicians, and is also an open colloboration. I wish we had an option to choose if plex natively pulls info from last.fm, allmusic or a mix of the two, but alas!
@destroy_musick – The problems I’ve had with the “Undefined” art and bios replacing what I had were definitely with lesser known artists. If I’m understanding correctly, it’s sounding like the problem is that many more of them were in last.fm and aren’t in allmusic, and your app is pulling the data from last.fm and inserting it into the plex DB so that plex can then apply it to those artists? Definitely sounds handy.
Seems like what we have here with plex is a circumstance where the metadata agent does not fail well. A better option would be something like what you’ve done (but automatic). If it fails to find anything in allmusic, it falls back to last.fm or at least to album art that has been manually added!
I’ve updated with a few more artists over the last couple of days and haven’t noticed any more issues regarding the “Undefined” return. Not sure if this was put into one of the last updates and didn’t make it to the change log?
Seems to be fixed on my side with the recent update. What version are you running? It doesn’t seem like it proactively goes back to remove the faulty images though. Could always do the plex dance on those or query the DB to quickly identify any of the artists with the faulty images
The “undefined” album art is gone, but a bunch of my albums (mostly Various Artists ones) have had the artist changed to Frank Loesser. Should be a relatively simple fix, but I still thought it was odd
I still have multiple albums that are coming up with the “undefined” album art. Some of them I had to manually change the album art, and others will return to the correct album art if I unmatch them, but if I rematch them they revert back to the “undefined” art. Looks like there may still be a few gremlins in the database. If there’s info I can provide about the ones that are changing back when I match them, let me know.
For some of them I had previously chosen artwork and it has been replaced. For others, I don’t have artist artwork and there doesn’t seem to be any way to just remove this art other than finding a black square gif in google images and saving that as the album art. Is there some way to not replace, but just remove album artwork once it has been downloaded / applied?
Perhaps a simple fix would be to have every album and artist have a default image that is included in the image choices that have been uploaded / added previously. So that rather than deleting an image we would have one that would work to replace incorrect art…more or less what I’ve been doing with uploading a black square, but with something that looks like the “no art” square that plex already uses…
If you’re confident enough with navigating the plex DB directly, you can run a SQL search to find every artist that has that instance of the image. I then manually refreshed all the artists who turned up
