Still no support for individual music "singles"

General Discussions
11

I’ve experimented with this, and have found that Plex is very accurate when dealing with properly-tagged files. It’s possible that your tags aren’t as correct as you think.

I too keep my music files meticulously tagged. My normal folder/file structure is this:

Music
  Genre
    Artist
      Album
        track 1.mp3
        track 2.mp3

After Plex made a change in the Plex Music agent last year to reduce dependency on the folder/file names, I did the following:

  1. Copied several genres/artists/albums to a parallel folder.
  2. Moved all the individual tracks from every album up to its ‘Genre’ level. These include individual artist albums, Various Artist albums, singles, EPs, the tracks now all bundled together.
  3. Renamed every file to ‘genre-0001.mp3’

So now I have an experimental structure literally named like this:

Music
  Celtic
    celtic-0001.mp3
    celtic-0002.mp3
  Rock
    rock-0001.mp3
    rock-0002.mp3
...

I normally use sidecar album cover files rather than embedded, but since I can’t have a dozen ‘cover.jpg’ files in one folder, I embedded album covers in some of these files to make sure it worked.

So now, other than the genre, there are no clues in the folder/file structure as to the artist, album, or track titles. With Plex fully configured to prefer local metadata, this assures that Plex must depend on the embedded tags.

I created a library pointing to the Music folder in the above structure and turned it loose. The resulting library was nearly perfect, with the same organization of artists and albums as my original library with the fully-specified folder/filename structure. Those tracks that had embedded album art used that art, while the rest drew cover images from MusicBrainz, and artist posters from wherever MusicBrainz gets them.

The point of all this is, Plex can successfully parse a folder full of mixed individual tracks from multiple albums, if the embedded tags are accurate. If your experience resulted in a “mess,” I’d recommend taking another look at your tags.