Why do my cover art images keep disappearing, over and over? A refresh brings them back, one at a time but not always correct; eventually they will disappear again. (Plex set to prefer ID3 tags.)
Even when a refresh brings them back on the server, to some extent, they’re still missing on mobile (phone) apps.
Do you have the same title in different libraries?
I get the same thing happening as I have an ‘Albums’ library and a ‘Singles’ library. Where there are duplicate titles in each. For example ‘The Beatles - Let it be’, the album art frequently disappears in one of the libraries. I can get it back by refreshing the metadata for the album or unmatching it, but it will disappear again at some point.
I found similar things, if you have multiple copies of the same album, one of the album arts will eventually disappear.
It seems impossible to reliably reproduce, I suspect it happens whenever the butler refreshes metadata during the maintenance schedule.
In some cases, they are the same but not in others. That doesn’t seem to make a difference. For the most part, titles are unique as I have different editions of the same album, i.e.,
The Beatles - 1969 - Abbey Road [1983 JP Toshiba Records CP35-3016]
The Beatles - 1969 - Abbey Road [1987 UK Parlophone Records CDP 7 46446 2]
The Beatles - 1969 - Abbey Road [2009 EU Apple Records 0946 3 82468 2 4]
Three albums / three titles, and probably different tracks. Many of the disappearing covers are unique but that doesn’t seem to matter as many are not, either.
I have three top-level categories resulting in about 30 libraries total:
Artists (FLAC)
Artists (FLACHD)
Artists (MP3)
…
Tributes (FLAC)
Tributes (FLACHD)
Tributes (MP3)
…
etc.
In fact, I always make the titles unique otherwise I end up with one album with three track 1’s, three track 2’s, three track 3’s, etc.
This is one reason I once posted about the possibility of disabling auto-fingerprinting. My config just confuses the hell out of it but apparently the disappearing covers is not caused by it if others have the issue too. That’s good news, anyway, as there’s nothing I could do about it if that were the case.
In most cases, the correct art will be selected and have a checkmark next to it but it’s not being displayed on the albums page. I think what’s needed is a lock for the images too. The checkmark is not a true lock as in the other fields.
Wow - never thought I’d find somebody with a Black Triangle copy of Abbey Road here!
I think it is something to do with matching. I have multiple copies of say Revolver, US Mono, US Stereo, UK Mono Matrix I, Mono Matrix II, Stereo, Reissues etc. Sometimes the get matched, even when the title is significantly different, sometimes not. When they are matched I lose the album art and track numbers are all over the place because of the different US and UK configurations. Same thing happens with Lennon’s Rock and Roll album of which I have regular versions and unofficial versions. So even though the title is 'Rock and Roll Music (Deluxe Edition), it still gets matched with one of the regular official versions and the discs and track numbers are confused. It tries to put titles found on discs 2-4 into disc 1. Unmatching it gets it all back in order, but despite setting it to get the metadata from the ID tags only, it still randomly manages to match it again. The solution I think would be a setting to permanently exclude specific albums from ever being matched.
Haha! Yep, I have a LOT of rare and audiophile stuff. Just added the Russian issue of the remastered Japanese edition of the The Beatles (Black Album) today. That one was hard to find.
The Beatles - 1981 - The Beatles (Black Album) [2012 JP-RU Toshiba Records TOCP-98524-5]
Guess we are using Plex in a way never envisaged.
Here’s an example.
After ‘Unmatching’ the two albums.
You may be right. I’m going to test that by turning off maintenance schedule options one at a time, starting with the extensive analysis option.
I have two monitors side-by-side, the Plex server and a Linux box logged into Plex, through Firefox, as a regular Plex user for a test account. There are many cases where the art is missing on it (and my phone) but exists on the server. I’ve discovered that if I drag/drop cover art into Plex server, for the album, and select that image the art then appears on the Linux box and phone now, too. Selecting an existing image does not work. A new one must be dropped into Plex. Whether it stays or not…
Un-matching doesn’t always work for me. Sometimes it messes up other the other albums’ tracks so I’m cautious using it.
An observation when adding albums this way:
Always add the albums with the most discs/tracks first, then the next one, until you get to the one with least last. For example, if there’s a single CD album, a double CD, and a 3 CD set of the same album and you’re wanting to add the 3 CD set the library… remove all the similar albums (the other two) and add them back one at a time starting with the 3 CD set, then the double CD set, then the single disc. Plex won’t get as confused if done this way.
unmatching is not a long term solution, as plex will eventually attempt to re-match.
I do not believe there is anyway to disable auto matching, it will be done whenever a library is rescanned and during maintenance.
Well, other than using the legacy/unsupported old music scanner.
this is one of the weakness of the ‘new music system’, it assumes that all music content is both:
at its heart, plex uses BEETS to match, so you can feel free to google that and see how limited in flexibility it is.
For the other fields, using the Lock will prevent them from being overwritten with anything. A simple solution would be for the devs to add a lock to the image also. The checkmark only selects; it doesn’t lock.
I would think Plex should first check the ID3 tag for artwork and stop right there if it finds one. No need to look any farther.
My audio library paths are structured like this:
PLEXFLAC/artist/album/track
PLEXFLACHD/artist/album/track
PLEXMP3/artist/album/track
And my track titles are (without the bullets… those were needed to preserve the 0 for this post):
• 01. Track 1 title.flac
• 02. Track 2 title.flac
These directories are off the root of an 18TB drive array. Could this layout cause unnecessary problems? Does the top-level need to be named Music to work properly?
no the top level doesn’t matter, and thats pretty close to what plex wants.
Thanks. Reading the post you supplied, I realized that I’ve been doing Various Artists differently but I seem to prefer my way. For example, I have several editions of Woodstock. Instead of using Various Artists for Album Artists, I simply use Woodstock on all Album Artists. I end up with a top-level Woodstock and all versions inside that. I don’t have a Various Artists that I have to hop through first, this way. It doesn’t seem to cause me problems that I’ve noticed.
Of course, if I only had a single copy of Woodstock then I would use Various Artists instead.
yes, like you I used to abuse ‘album artist’ as a category or grouping, however the plex scanner/matcher hates that.
you will have matching issues and/or jacked up artists, sooner or later, plex currently doesn’t have a concept of separate album and track artists, only regular albums or compilations (various artists).
it also really dislikes any folders filled with random or otherwise non-same-album music (ie a folder full of random tracks), and anything that does not otherwise match musicbrainz (ie random internet compilations).
but hey if you can get it to work well enough for you, that is one less thing to worry about.
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