Suggestions- cutting last ties to iTunes

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Before discovering Plex a few years back, I never had any sort of organised video library. But my music library, which is a lot bigger, has been organised through iTunes since before iPods had colour displays. So when I started using Plex, I organised my video libraries from scratch, but for music I just pointed it at my iTunes folder and called it a day.

I would use Plex to play music on other devices, but on my iMac where my server is based (and where I spend my work day), I didn’t really start using Plex as my default music player until Plexamp was released. I love Plexamp, and it’s now where all my playlists are and I love the new Guest DJ features. And since iTunes’ last update, you can now no longer browse albums by ‘date added’ beyond your 60 most recent, which was basically the last nail in the coffin for me.

The TROUBLE IS, iTunes lets me just drag and drop mp3s onto it and it’ll add them to my library, sorted neatly in folders for artists and subfolders for albums, and if I update the info and add album art, it changes the metadata, filenames, and folder names and structure to match. So I still have iTunes open all the time since its the quickest way to add things to my library.

I’m NOT suggesting these features be added to Plexamp, I know none of that stuff would be high on the radar- but iTunes is SUCH a bulky program, and I’m only running it to sort files and handle metadata. I was wondering if other people on here use any third party tools or programs to do all this stuff that work well with Plex, and might be lighter than running two music players constantly.

I’m able to rename files and add album art etc in Plex of course, but having it baked into the metadata ensures the info will be correct if I ever lose my library and have to add it all again.

Thanks for any help, and thanks for reading all that- I realise this was a very long winded way to ask for metadata app suggestions.

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I use Picard to organize and tag all my music. Because Plex uses MusicBrainz as a metadata source, an added benefit of Picard is that the MusicBrainz IDs it adds to your files can be used by Plex to match your content quickly, similar to adding the tvdb/tmdb/imdb id to a movie/TV folder.

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+1 for Picard.

As DTR said, we use MusicBrainz to match your media. Under the hood, if the tags include MusicBrainz IDs, we (heavily) weight towards that item in the database for matching purposes.

Aside from more involved solutions (like Beets), I believe Picard is the only tag management tool to write those IDs to your files.

There’s even a handy guide here that was put together by the community to help you get started with Picard:

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