And try streaming it to any device that doesn’t have AirPlay (the deal breaker for me).
And I HATE that I have to use it to load music on an iPhone. Plex solves that.
Thanks @certuna. Unfortunately (unless I missed something?) it looks like Prism also only supports a very limited number of tags… and there is no option to sort, search or filter by composer.
I’ll keep searching to see if I can find an alternative (and I’ll post here if I do)… but if anyone has any other suggestions, I’d love to hear them!
Thanks
Plex unfortunately does not store composer metadata at all in its database so no player can use it - what Prism can do is search for track artists (which is stored in the Plex DB but the Plex apps don’t use).
The Plex database has some other metadata limitations (for example, year and genre are stored for albums but not for individual tracks), until that’s fixed no client can do anything about it. Same with other metadata cases like multiple artists on 1 track, work/movement (for classical music), arranger, producer, etc.
+1 for TCOM, TDOR (usefull when there are many versions of the same album), TIT1, 2, 3 and TPE1, 2, 3. Also displaying of these tags would be good to have, if they are too long for a single line -> to allow multiple lines or slow rolling to show all name/title/data.
Now I am in process of retagging my music library but just found is a total waste of time since the results will be far from my expectations.
IMO, these guys from PLEX are just focused on what they think is important and not what is required. It would be nice if they change their behavior, get out from their box and start to answer to customers requests.
And btw, there are a lot of other issues and bugs, but why to bother to share or ask for fixes if there is nothing happening? As I said, a total waste of time. It is clear that PLEX devs are not on the same page with their customers. Forcing us to adapt to app and not make app adapt to customer needs.
My 2 cents on this topic.
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Even just storing Metadata for individual tracks instead of just albums would be a huge improvement. I can’t imagine doing that would be super complicated since I know people have done their own personal workarounds to get Metadata stored into the database.
Getting the metadata situation up to a good standard is definitely my most wanted feature from Plex since music is my primary usage for Plex. It would really allow a lot more flexibility and I even feel like fixing the way metadata is done in plex would fix a lot of the inconsistent behavior and other issues people sometimes have when it comes to refreshing metadata and updating the library.
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So should we, or should we not use ID3 tags in music files? This Plex article recommends against it.
That recommendation was added to that article at about the time that they revamped the music metadata scanner a few months ago. The scanner is much more accurate than it was, and it eliminated greatly reduced the need for the “Plex Dance,” which by itself was worth the change. But the trade-off is that the scanner is also a lot pickier about the accuracy of metadata than it was before. It’s also pickier about folder structure and filenames too, which I don’t understand at all. (A subsequent update to the scanner removed dependence on folder/filename structure when embedded tags are used)
I took exception to that recommendation (I wish I could find the thread) when I saw it, as I have long railed against the online databases for all the garbage they have in them. My embedded tags are far more accurate.
It was explained to me that the recommendation was made primarily because they expected most users would not take the time to maintain their embedded tags sufficiently to be useful.
As for “…potentially be missing out on future musical enhancements that rely on new and even richer metadata information coming from online sources,” I’ll cross that bridge when it falls on me, but I don’t quite buy it. The scanner behavior when preferring embedded tags has always been to use local tags if they exist, and fall back to online sources if a local tag is missing. If they continue that, there should be no reason to “miss out” based on this choice.
So my recommendation is to use the ‘Prefer local metadata’ option if you want to, and if you have made the effort to keep your embedded tags in good order. The new scanner will definitely show you where your tags are not in good order, believe me (it won’t spell out the problem - it will just give weird results)!
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If you block the domain names mbz.plex.tv and acoustid.plex.tv (and some others) Plex won’t use any online metadata.
That doesn’t get around the odd/nonstandard requirements that the new scanner introduced (such as mandating track numbers, album artist can’t be empty, certain file/foldernames, etc) but at least it won’t introduce ‘alien’ metadata.
I’m completely on the same page as you @beckfield , but now with the new scanner, Plex only needs a bare minimum of local metadata (artist and album mainly), matches it with MusicBrainz, and gets the rest of the metadata from there, all done. I can understand their reasoning to go this online-over-local route - for one, it’s much easier to code.
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agreed that reading (all) tags should be the highest priority.
plex’s insistence on using path for metadata, is the biggest issue.
path/filename should only be used as fallback.
path/filename should be irrelevant as long as the tags are good.
even if the tags are not good, plex should simply add the files, fill in what tags it can find, then display the path/filename and let the user decide when or how to fill in any missing information.
this is the difference between n00b music library and a librarian library.
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From what I can see, on this topic there was just one reply from plex staff (an off topic comment from elan about Stephen King), all the replies came exclusively from the plex customers! What is this? I imagine that all of us have other better things to do than to report things and comment stuff, hoping somebody from plex dev team is reading, considering our suggestions and replying something. But there was still nothing!
Whatever, just to add my last findings to this topic: with download art from online sources enabled, my PMS (nvidia shield) is downloading a lot of posters. It is great, huh? Now what would you say if for some music albums so many images were downloaded (for some albums there were 6-8 pics displayed on web interface when trying to edit the album), but plex ends to not display anything, even there are images embedded in the music files (mostly I’m talking about flac files). Just an another confirmation about the annoying misuse of the online sources.
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If you look at the way that movies and tv show metadata is handled in Plex (all from online sources, imdb, tvdb, moviesdb, etc) I’m not surprised that the developers are going the same route for music with MusicBrainz.
I’m not too happy about it, but I hope that now that the new scanner is here, at least they’ll start implementing more metadata fields. The MusicBrainz database has loads more info (composer, original release year, release type, producer, multiple artists/genres, etc) than Plex is currently using. If they were serious about supporting more local tags, they’d have implemented it years ago.
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Plex doesn’t even support NFO files for movies, and thats where Plex started from.
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I can understand that, sidecar files are a bit of a relic from the 90s, before media file formats had embedded metadata.
But very widely used and most other applications use them, create them…
Their a text file easily edited if needed.
Embedded metadata is not widely used in video…
done… don’t want to get off topic…
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Let’s be honest here. As seeing how Plex development is going, this is really not going to happen.
Personally I find pretty much all of these server-based media players are utterly useless for my case. Any person who has decent amount of classical and/or size exceeds 2000+ albums should find it is just impossible task without building whole thing based on id3 tags, and pretty much none of these media players utilize tag support.
Plex, Emby as well as supposedly music oriented ones like Subsonic (and its forks) and most other ones still do not support search by composer to this date, for example.
The fact that those ‘music players’ do not have something that oldest music players like foobar2000 has it from start should tell you guys that none of those developers, including Plex, has actual experience in maintaining large music library.
I suggest just use something like Nextcloud + any decent offline music players like foobar, mediamonkey or jriver media player. I pretty much gave up on this issue a long time ago.
We are overdue for a better solution to Plex. This entire project lost its way years ago. They keep adding things no one wants and ignoring popular feature requests.
They are chasing that “big media hub”, except it is already crowded and really few people who are interested in Plex care about it.
I did check those Movies & TV on Plex and Tidal, but the problem is, why should I use them when there are other better alternatives? They forgot why people are using Plex in the first place; play their own contents.
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I don’t think they forget that, but since most people do not tag their movies, tv shows or music very well, Plex focuses primarily on getting the metadata from online databases, not local tags. It’s annoying for the small group of people with large, well-tagged collections.
Classical music support is pretty bad across the board. Apple does it reasonably well (supports composer, work, movement) but doesn’t do remote streaming (without buying their cloud storage), and doesn’t do conductor, arranger, original year, or multiple performers/genres. Roon is good but very expensive. The Subsonic API doesn’t support composer/conductor/multiple performers so any server or client that uses this protocol can’t do it either.
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I use the FREE MP3TAG program and link it to DISCOGS and MISCBRAINZ - I am able to get 97% of all the tag data I want - some of them I have to manually update or change (like I wish all my tracks numbers to be 2 digit (01,02, 03, etc.) and my DISCS to be 1, 2, 3, etc. not 1/2 2/2).
I have over 60,000 songs and find MP3TAG is very easy to use after a little playing. You can RENAME files, etc. as well.
bh
I miss my Squeezeboxes! Who remembers those good old days?
