Not to threadjack too much, but… if a person wanted to explore alternative software for home music… has anyone found an alternative they like? Something with robust ID3 support?
(I’d be really interested in something that would let me rate songs and write the ratings into the tags, in some standard format. I’m generally uninterested in, well, the Plex model… where your metadata requires a specific app. Any metadata worth keeping should be in the files.)
Just to everyone who are still waiting for id3 tag support for years; Emby now supports id3 tag (currently in beta). Also it seems Navidrome, a pork of subsonic, now supports id3 tag as well ( turned out to be it’s been a while since it started supporting it ).
I don’t think this will be ever implemented on Plex considering this has been requested since 2015 and pretty stayed at top list per voting and no response from devs so far.
Instead we got… emulator subscription service.
At least now we have viable alternatives now.
See my post above. We have alternatives now.
Also I believe rating is not in id3 standard, so it is up to each server/player to handle the issue, which can be problematic. Things like mp3tag allows us to transform one tag value to another if files are tagged in consistent manner so I guess you can use it if some server/player does not recognize the rating tag used by others.
I know there’s a separate feature request out there for lyrics tags, but I would be good if that one was just merged into this. That one has less than 20 votes. If this one actually ever gets attention - as long as they are working on supporting mp3 tags I’d prefer they simply support them all.
As many others including I said, Plex devs have no intention to implement tagging support, let alone lyrics. The half of this thread have been all about finding workarounds and alternatives, which now we have.
Not interested in Emby until they implement dynamic playlists - that might make me interested in switching. Lack of full ID3 tag support isn’t enough to warrant an additional service for me, so there’s no harm in keeping this feature request alive until someone from Plex officially kills the idea.
I think I’ll just delete my Mozart folder instead of reading though this nightmare…
I’d like to think there is hope of change. After all Plex put significant effort into the pretty decent PlexAmp player, so music does seem to have some importance still?
My bandaid for years past and likely years to come is to continue using iTunes playlists, and periodically refresh those into Plex. Lots of problems with this solution, but at least I can pull up a playlist of thousands of songs and cast it.
I’ve got a lot of albums with multiple artists. The fact that the “Artists” view i Plex only shows Album Artists is amazingly bad, I want to browse all tracks by a single artist, regardless of which album artist those tracks are tagged with. I’m currently looking for a better music alternative than Plex/PlexAmp…
Rating is an id3 field, but nobody really uses it anymore, since it’s pretty impractical - downloading the file from somewhere, you get someone else’s ratings, or if you have multiple users accessing the same music library you’ll get your partner’s ratings, etc. Ratings (like playlists) work better/more intuitive in practice when they’re associated per-user, not tagged into the song itself.
Another issue with storing ratings in the metadata tags, is that your player then needs write access to the files, which is a bit of a security issue (especially with an internet-facing application like Plex).
Emby and Navidrome are indeed now making strides supporting more metadata fields than Plex. It’s not all rosy though. Emby is still very album-centric: click on an artist and you would expect to see something like the iTunes/Music interface: a list of his Albums plus a list of individual tracks on compilations. But instead, you see a big list of Albums and Compilation Albums all mixed together. Navidrome also doesn’t combine album artist and track artist yet (it’s supposed to come though).
I have taken a lot of effort to make sure my embedded ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags on my music files and MP4 Music Video files are accurate. Yet, no matter how many times I rescan my music library, it does not seem to pull this information.
I read where it recommends a format of %artist%/%album%/%Track% for figuring out the information. Well, I did not set that up and there are plenty of albums out there that have tracks from numerous artists, so that gets to be kind of a tough thing to do. My library started from back in Windows Media player days and it is structured as %Album%/%TrackNumber% - %Artist% - %TrackTitle%. And I have embedded album art, genre, and just about everything else I could on my 41,000+ MP3 music files. And I have done the embedding only for my 9600+ music video files. (Before you ask, all legally purchased.)
A ton of media players out there read these tags. It seems to me that Plex should be able to do so, too, if the code would be added to do it.
Music Videos seems like a cross between Movies and Music and that format should probably use a mixture of the two as far as technology. Granted, I imagine much of the Plex user base does not use that type of media. It comes in really handy for parties.
Please Add more support for tags in Music. That will make Plex the Number 1 software for home media. Emby and Jellyfin have better support for music tags and even has a “appears on” spot for artist just like Spotify.
I found a roundabout solution I thought i’d share. I’ve been using PicardBrainz to get the “official” data for each record. Then Metadatics to add my own Genres and move the performing artists data to Comments, then replaced the Track Artist, Album Artist and Composer with the name of the composer.
I just found that I could keep Album Artist with the name of the composer and put back the performing artists in Album Artist. This leads Plex to tag each record with the Album Artist (aka Composer) for the whole album, and indicates the performer in front of each track. This is something iTunes didn’t do well. So far this seems to be a good solution. I hope it can help someone else.
In summary: get the info from PicardBrainz and only replace the Album Artist field with the info you would use for the Composer field.
“no one listens to classical music” (as if classical describes all centuries/periods involved.
“no one bothers to tag their classical music”
“no one cares”
This type of nonsense is an oversimplification but if granularity is not required then all a ‘normal listener’ needs is the album artist, album name, and track name. There are other fields which many know of, performer, conductor, orchestra, etc. but almost none of them are standard. the “best” solution is to use composer tag, albumartist match composer, blah blah.
So what does this wind up looking like on larger libraries?
This is what the dev team of plex (or any other music database ‘thinks’ we want to do (see pic)
Want fine control of your metadata? use mp3tag, foobar, custom tags, and sadly itunes music or some equivalent. foobar is terrible for mobile support (mediamonkey is better), the next best is probably emby but I have plex and I’ll keep waiting.
//End Rant
(for anyone curious, alac/flacs are joined on grouping into one file and show up as multiples on foobar. shuffle will behave properly. individuals can be played as necessary. if i care enough to listen to an adagio or an allegro i have 100k other tracks i can find on shuffle. the romantic piano concerto series by naxos is 80+ cd volumes which i’ve ‘joined’ into 205 files.) the entire point of joining them into one file, is because plex, windows media player, etc. almost never shuffle multi track ‘works’ properly.
I was ‘excited’ about how cool plexamp looks and sonic analysis, but it still falls short. compilations for the first time are recognized as distinct from other albums, soundtracks, lives, lps, etc. it’s a step in the right direction, but they need to get back to basics with the composer tag if they ever want to get someone like me to use it as my primary player. not being able to find in this compilation alone, 84+ hours is saddening. at least itunes/music understands the composer tag sigh
Aside: if the artist field scrolled when too long on plexamp, etc, i wouldn’t mind so much as i’d eventually see the composer at the end. wouldn’t help me on search, but for a shuffle scenario i’d still see it. that should be pretty easy to implement.
It took a while but it seems that they implemented processing the MusicBrainz release group information (Tag support for ROBUST music library organization - #75 by beckfield). Now, fingers crossed that they allow to set this field manually and from tags ([How-To] Album Types and Editing MusicBrainz - #10 by SimonXCIV)…
Anyways, also vouching for this feature, not only for proper tag support but also to process and handle the tags properly (like: support multiple artists per track and not having them grouped with the seperator (artist1 & artist2), Better support for albums and tracks with multiple artists).
With all the great music improvements over the past years, I have a bit more hope that music gets more priority.
I would like to say I could just import iTunes playlists, but even that’s hit or miss. Right now it’s miss. This time around the logs show plenty of activity, and then the process just quits without any logged reason why.
The logs show loads of errors due to not handling character encoding for special characters, so lots of files get skipped even when the import works.
I’ve been doing this for literally years by the way, so I know what hit or miss means. Very unreliable but still my best solution to “use” iTunes smart playlists in Plex.
I have a simple library where tracks are grouped into folders by genre, and each file has the “Genre” tag set as the name of the folder (genre). As an example, emby detects and sorts all of my library by the embedded genre, all tracks are there and everything works just fine.
Plex however is a mess.
First, it doesn’t even read the ID3-standard “Genre” tag for some reason, so if I try to create a smart playlist based on genre I only find “Album genre” and “Artist genre”, and I have no idea where these come from.
Secondly, there does seem to be a genre tag but only for the entire album. I don’t know why Plex developers thought this is a great idea, because logically an album can have multiple tracks of different genres.
An example:
I have 16 tracks in the “Breaks” folder.
I then try to organize them by Genre (well either Album genre or Artist genre):
There’s a missing song, but it has the correct genre:
In the library I have the genres set to “embedded tags”.
So in my opinion Plex should first adhere to the standard ID3 tags embedded in the files and then, optionally, offer to pull info from the internet. I have all of my files organized so I don’t need that, I just prefer the embedded tags.
Also, there’s the Artist vs. Album Artist thing…
I canceled my plex pass that I got for Plexamp (which is great btw) just for this.
Plex doesn’t understand per-track genre tags and from what I’ve read it would take a major redesign to change that. I voted for this feature and will politely upvote it wherever it comes up, but… we’re probably out of luck. At least for a while.
Just today I was thinking how I wish it had the “Appears on” feature that OP has mentioned. It often happens where I have a track that is by artist X & Y and it’s placed in artist X’s page but I’d like to be able to see it on both those artists pages to be reminded that it exists if I go to Y’s artist page.
Plex definitely should up their game on the music library.
a track should be possible without an album.
a compilation album has multiple track artists; these artists must be available in the library.
multiple genre and artist tag support is a must.
albums must be determined by the album tag, not by folder, this is not the year 2000.
windows was able to do all this 10 years ago with windows media player and media center.
