After spending forever converting my music library I finally more or less finished converting most of the artist that could be matched with Musicbrainz. I had the time to do it as I’m staying at home due to the corona pandemic… I still have to add some missing artists to the Musicbrainz database, so I’ll be starting that soon.
There is some aspects that are better with the current library, and some that are worse than before.
Here are my thoughts:
I was able to match more of my artist properly using musicbrainz. It also did a better job at differentiating artist with the same name.
Artist bios seems to be a bit all over the place. I often found that bios would be emtpy even when musicbrainz had artist bios present. I guess this come from a different source?
Plex is not dealing with various artists albums in a good proper way at all. Only album artists are considered artists in the library, and Plex treats “Various Artists” as a separate artist in the library. According to the Plex library I have 962 artists split between 2815 albums. In reality it should be over 3000 artists, because of complations, soundtracks with multiple contributors, split credits (see next point below) and so on. This also means that it’s impossible to see what albums artists are contributing to. Plex have to read the artist tag to populate the library, and use album artist to figure out witch artist to assign the album to. Very, very bad current method.
Plex is not able to deal with albums with more than one Artist present in either Album Artist or Artist tags. Makes it impossible to actually match all albums and artists with Musicbrainz, as you have to pick one artist when there is more than one present. This creates a lot of other problems when browsing the library.
Plex seem to disregard my settting of not fetching album art from the internet automatically. Often picking some low-resolution garbage. I had to manually fix a lot of covers to a high resolution one. There is no way of knowing witch of the presented artwork is local and which is from the internet. It would be nice to be able to see the source, size and resolution of the cover art shown.
The current way of discovering related artists in the library is worse than with the old library using last.fm. In the prosess of converting my library I found that most of the related artists previously discovered was lost. It worked better for more famous artists, but worse for everything else.
I think that was most of my major thoughts on the music library in Plex.
Musicbrainz is merely linking to Wikipedia, while Plex is trying to fetch bios from allmusic.com and (if failing) from last.fm
So make sure that all your artists on MB have links to their allmusic.com or at least last.fm artist pages.
It might have actually fetched album art either from embedded art in your files or from sidecar graphics files in the album folder. If you have an “organically grown” collection (who doesn’t), you will have some album folders with such tiny album art thumbnails in them. These files can even be hidden in a regular file browser. See How do I remove an incorrect tv show poster - #3 by OttoKerner
Thanks for clarifying. Is it possible to maybe pull from musicbrainz itself when no other sources are available? It’s not really important to me to have populated bios. It’s mostly for fun, when available. I probably wont bother to to this for the hundreds of niche japanese music I listen to.
Quite possible for some of them, or maybe it’s some leftover from the converted library? I had it turned on originally. Regardless I think that it should avoid changing album art when it’s an embedded image present. Plex should assume the embedded art is the preferred one.
I disagree. Changing the embedded album art is more difficult for a regular user than adding the correct album art as a sidecar cover.jpg in the album folder.
And embedded album art should not get too large, or it may cause weirdness with players.
That is the reason why sidecar album art takes precedence.
It can’t pull from musicbrainz, because MB doesn’t have bios. Their website only pulls them live from Wikipedia. But Plex doesn’t “scrape” the MB website but uses a proper API.
I have experienced that my 1000x1000px embedded image is replaced with art that seems to be 50x50px files (or something like that). I have also experienced Plex picking a seemingly random page from the booklet subfolder (when present) and picking a 3000x1500 two page scan from the booket. Plex really should not do this. This is also why I suggested showing the user the source, size and resolution of each presented art.
Sometimes it happens, sometimes it does not. I have no idea what logic Plex picks artwork from.
I think Plex should consider the needs of more advanced users with the know-how. If it is undesired to default to the embedded art, let me toggle it with a library setting. You already let users keep the metadata as-is, why not album art?
E: By “changed” I mean in the library, not the embedded data in the file.
I generally agree, but I think there should be some correlation between leaving the metadata untouched and leaving the album art as well, as both assumes the presented data on the user end is correct and sensible.
I am in agreement in the confusion. I have over 600 CDs ripped in my collection. See the image - all ARTITSTS have their own folder - and some are compilation CDs and are in a folder called VARIOUS ARTISTS - and within them is the ALBUM.
ALL of my files have the EMBEDDED IMAGE of the Cover (at 1000x1000) and the same image in the folder (again see image) When PLEX scanned my library files - all the images were “crappy” to say the least.
I have about 300 more CDs/Albums I have yet to do my work on them - using an app which corrects the TRACK NAMES, and such for me. Then there are some manual processes I do. To get them where I want them to be. In total when I am done there will be about 2TB of music on my server - well over 40,000 songs and about 980 CDs/Albums. This does not even include my MASSIVE (over 45,000 songs) of just Christmas music.
Someone told me I should remove the cover art from the files…but I like it in there - as when I put stuff on a USB and put in my car - they display on the screen while it plays – so I don’t wanna do that.
I’m not sure the file cdart.png is used by Plex. Use cover.jpg or folder.jpg.
Go on the hunt for other, hidden graphics files in the folder (see the above link) and remove them.
I agree 100%. And not just for music libraries. It’s impossible to tell what cover art you have chosen, they all look good with the tiny thumbnails presented in Plex Web, particularly in the .edit screen You can only see the difference when you use another app. Then back to Plex web and make your next best guess.
Thanks Otto and leelynds…. I will re-evaluate the cdart file. As I am migrating from an old XMBC system, and they worked fine over there.
I just know if I play in the Windows PLEX app, and make them fill the screen - they are HORRIBLY FUZZY. I do know that all of them with embedded graphics are at 1000x1000dpi. Made sure of that when I updated them all.
Any of you know what PLUG-INS are available for PLEX? Something that shows something other than the coverart for Music? Like a spectrum equalizer or something?
This is the path - and it plays fine - has the cover art, but not sure if it is pulling from the FILE or the folder’s files. I did change the AGENTS to look at LOCAL MEDIA first. And RE-SCANNED and ANALYZED the library.
E:\MUSIC\Depeche Mode\Violator\03 - Personal Jesus.mp3
Embedded cover art and “sidecar” cover art are both “local”.
This info screen only tells you that Plex did recognize the embedded cover art within the file (“Has Thumbnail=1”). Nothing else.
