The New Plex Music

General Discussions
1

Over the holiday season, there have been thousands of people who have considered in taking the leap to buy a lifetime Plex Pass subscription. Although many of the features with Plex Pass are nice to have, there is one prime features, besides DVR, Plex Cloud, and Offline downloads, that really would catch people’s attention and make that subscription: Plex Music.

The way it’s structured now, Plex allows you to create two different music libraries depending on your subscription. Free members are only allowed to build a basic music library which is rather useless because of the functionality that it brings. Plex has decided that to enjoy music that is immerse and creative, you must subscribe to Plex Pass. With the technology backed by Gracenote, your music becomes entirely useful to create playlists right from the piece of music you have uploaded or mood.

However, the major problem with Plex Music is Better Matching via Gracenote.

As Plex describes it:

“We’ve worked with Gracenote to integrate their industry-leading sonic fingerprinting technology so that your music can be matched no matter how messy your library (and embedded metadata) may be.”

Sonic fingerprinting technology has never worked quite as flawlessly or useful as one would like it to. Any subscriber to Apple Music or iTunes Match or Google Play Music would know that using this technology often not only takes a very long time to organize and match content, but to also play it as well. After reading different responses from people regarding Plex Music, it doesn’t matter if you use the cloud, NAS, or high-CPU driven PC, Plex Music does not and could not work as promised.

What could be the possible solution to fixing Plex Music so it’s more enjoyable to Plex members and may spike Plex Pass membership?

The answer to creating a new agent called Plex Music. Earlier this year, Plex introduced Plex Movie.

As they describe it, Plex Movie is:

“… agent is the default agent used to gather Movie metadata. This is a comprehensive agent, which pulls information from a number of different metadata sources, including IMDb, The Movie Database, and Rotten Tomatoes, among others.”

Plex Music would be a default agent for all users, or if Plex really wants music to stay exclusive, for Plex Pass users, to gather music metadata from Gracenote and would not require to use sonic fingerprinting to do it. Rather, any music users want to upload must use the required hierarchy for naming and folder structure, the same way it is now.

ARTIST
ALBUM
TRACKS

From my experience and reading other experiences, the sonic fingerprinting will freeze libraries and crash servers especially when you’re working on large music libraries because sonic fingerprinting requires from the system, in this case it’s Gracenote, to listen to a fragment of your music to correctly identify what music is what. In other words, in some cases, do you have a live version of a song or a studio recording?

Thoughts about fixing Plex Music would be welcome. I see the promise of Plex Music quite powerful, but with this sonic fingerprinting, especially with people with large libraries, it will freeze and timeout systems.

Let’s keep this an open conversation.

2

I purchased a PLEX pass solely to take advantage of the “features” afforded by a Premium Music Library. I immediately (within minutes) reverted back to a Basic Music Library because the matching was highly inaccurate. It made me realize that the last thing in the world I want is for someone else to tag my music.

Therefore, I would argue that it’s not PLEX that needs to be fixed; it’s your metadata. With properly tagged MP3s, a Basic Music Library provides (almost) everything needed to manage and otherwise enjoy a digital music collection. In addition, the metadata isn’t married to PLEX and moves seemlessly to any digital music player or other platform outside of the PLEX ecosystem.

I’ve surmised that using external sources for tagging mainstream TV Shows and Feature Films works simply because there’s fewer of them. The catalog of recorded music is much more expansive and I’m not convinced that there’s a technology or single resource that now or will ever exist that can satsify a music aficionodo when it comes to tagging.

If I were allocating resources, my recommendation for the folks at PLEX would be to focus their efforts on streamlining and standardizing the music playback and synchronization features across their various apps, and to abandon their attempts to provide a one-stop shop for music metadata at the track/album level.

3

srewobwj,

I do agree with your comments. I would add that sonic fingerprinting is still at fault. My metadata is properly tagged. I spent at least two months fixing this issue and I still have issues with it.

With Plex’s basic music library, it is nice, but you can’t create a playlist from a song or a mood that’s great when you don’t know what to listen to. There is simply no service that can do this anymore. I use to be able to do this with iTunes and its Genius feature. It’s great to create music instantly when you have thousands of songs that you have.

There’s the TVDB, the MOVIEDB, why not the MusicDB? I do understand they have to stop their one-stop shop for music metadata at the track/album level needing to be fixed because for various artists especially, this can be a major problem.

Thank you for your comments, let’s have the discussion continue if possible.

4

In the end, the company which maximizes flexibility will likely win the battle over music organizing. Users should be given options on using metatags and fingerprinting.

People who have put the serious effort into making sure their metatags are accurate should be able to create a library based on the metatags while still receiving the data on moods and PlexMix based on their song title and artist tags.

People who would rather invest in the data base of Gracenote should be able to select fingerprinting alone.

In either case, Plex should make available a button for albums, artists and tracks which will allow a user to manually select either tags or fingerprinting on a case by case basis.

The ability to be able to generate a playlist either by mood or by song selection is what attracted me to Plex. When one has tens of thousands of songs to select from, creating a play list is very time consuming. Automating that task beyond just selecting a ‘genre’ from a tag list allows one to better enjoy a large library.

This is a good conversation starter.

5

zephcom,

I do agree with you on all of your comments.

6

Hmm could you explain how one can vertify his own Collection of music via Fingerprint? To single out a live version when it should be a studio version as example? Or recognizing a song without any tags?
I do still have some errors in the music library and I was kind of hoping plex would automaticly handle those. But even with gracenote activated, it s not perfect.

7

Dreadeus,

To answer your question, Gracenote provides sonic fingerprinting which is a method that uses technology to know whether you have a live recording or studio. Gracenote’s process must listen to fragments of your music in order to properly match your music.

I have a lot of MTV Unplugged songs. For Jay-Z’s unplugged, I have these versions and studio versions of songs he performed. In order for Gracenote to do its job, it has to listen to fragments in milliseconds to ensure its getting the proper version of the recordings. This is why when you scan and match your music with Plex Music; it must do a scan pass at least 2-3 times to ensure that Gracenote has listened to every track’s fragment to match it properly.

You are correct. It is not perfect and its not meant to be because the number of commands, depending how large the library of music is, are unimaginable to make it seem as if it can do its job.

When you add a TV or Movie file, there is no listening of a fragment involve. Rather, metadata plays the largest role in determining the right information for your file. If Plex Pass music with Gracenote would work the same, eliminate the sonic fingerprinting, things would work more smoothly.

The sonic fingerprinting is CPU driven as well because it has to listen to music fragments. This can takes weeks or months depending how large your library is.

If this is not clear, please let me know. I’ve done research on this a lot because I love the idea of Plex Music with Gracenote, but the sonic fingerprinting needs to go to make it worth it. iTunes uses Gracenote and does not use sonic fingerprinting except for iTunes Match. For Genius, it does not and is able to match music well.

8

Thanks for your elaborate answer.

So I understand you right when I say that after the library is scanned, the sonic Fingerprint will still continue doing his job for the next several weeks?

As far as the topic goes I do agree that the ability to do a “Fingerprint-scan” on certain parts of the music collection, or for everything at once would be nice if it was included.

Perfect would be a function to correct an artist, if a mistake was found via fingerprint. (which should have the ability to move wrong files to the correct place)

But to be absolutly honest. I absolutly adore Plex, but listening to music so far has been the most frustrating part of it. With the android app I get skipps to the next song, sometimes they won t play. (pretty sure it has something to do with sleep mode)
When listening to a song the 3-4 time, it would be nice if it was automaticly downloaded…a smoother interface for really big libraries…

Regarding Music I think we just need to be a bit more patient. They now work on hardware acceleration and that is a big one that probably has most People hyped. Many People also use Subsonic as an addition. (I disregard that idea, because the beauty of Plex is, that media is centralized.) After hardware acceleration we may get lucky and some improvements are made…if not then later, one of the things I checked before buying an account is whetever the company is actively working and improving Plex and as far as I could tell they do.

9

Dreadeus,

My most sincere apologies for not getting back to you and waiting almost a week to answer back.

As far as to answer your question, the answer is yes. This is because even after adding your music collection, there might be updates and those updates depending on how much music you have in your library could take days to do.

As I have stated before, I do agree with your comments regarding Plex Music. The music part of the service can be restored and replaced, but without sonic fingerprinting. The process to add music content takes too much time. It’s like asking a person to listen to 10 pieces of music at once and then categorize each song. It cannot be done, no matter how advanced technology gets.

In a recent podcast interview, one of the top Plex team members did inform customers that major improvements to Plex Premium Music Library is coming so being patient will be done.

For now, it’s not well to use.

If you have any more questions, I’d be happy to answer them. Let the discussion continue for those interested at all with Plex Music.

10

Has there been any more news about updated features to Plex Premium Music? I am almost at the point of deleting my PMM library and going back to Subsonic. However before I do I would be interested in what might be coming ( If announced).

11

@richardap1 said:
Has there been any more news about updated features to Plex Premium Music? I am almost at the point of deleting my PMM library and going back to Subsonic. However before I do I would be interested in what might be coming ( If announced).

@richardap1 -

At this time, I heard a podcast with one of the founders or leaders at Plex discussing that there would be new features coming to Plex Premium Music, but nothing has come of it as of yet. I think the biggest aspect of the upgrade has been the inclusion of Plex Cloud, but that’s it.

The real concern with Plex Music is the scanning and adding of content. They have yet to figure out a new way to add music well without the need of sonic fingerprinting which has damaged a lot of people’s libraries.