Trying to set up music library of ~15000 radio broadcasts, albums/artists not showing up correctly

[agentmith]

Sorry for the length but this has been a major hassle so I’m trying to be thorough. I can’t find any information that relates to what I’m experiencing online anywhere. I tried the plex subreddit, but no one was able to help there. TL;DR at the bottom.

I have a massive library of ~15000 misc radio broadcasts and shows spanning several decades that I’m trying to add to my Plex server, and I have not had any luck with getting everything to show up in in a way that reflects the metadata or how I’ve organized the files. I’ve painstakingly gone through every file and set all the metadata tags by hand, setting album/artist to match the folder name and removing all other tags. The library either won’t update when I initiate a refresh or rescan, even when drilled down into the artist or album. I tried doing ‘refresh all metadata’ for the library itself but this didn’t update correctly either. Initially some of the tag changes I made DID register, but not for everything. A good portion of the albums still aren’t working correctly, or they have missing files or something else is incorrect.

Most of these don’t have any searchable online metadata information, but being hopeful, I initially I had left library settings at defaults to see if it would just pick up the folder names appropriately. This took 3 days and didn’t work, so I enabled ‘prefer local metadata’ which forces you to use the ‘Plex Music Scanner’ scanner. I set the agent to ‘Personal Media Artists’, and tried toggling everything else on or off at different times, but no permutation of this will make the files update to their configured metadata.

In the top-level folder I have everything grouped in 1 layer of subfolders based on people, or shows. For example, Amos & Andy, which has 224 mp3s. I set all these IDv3 tags for Album and Artist to “Amos & Andy”, and removed everything else. My intention is to play the files alphabetically as the dates are nested inside the filename. Ideally when I go to my library, I should see “Amos & Andy” with all the files showing up in the correct order, in one playlist. I don’t mind if it’s another click if I can’t omit the requirement for having a separate “artist” and “album”, but ideally everything should show in one playlist as shows sometimes span multiple segments/files.

What happens is all over the place usually. For this example, 2 albums show up: one album still has album art with 4 files in it, the other album doesn’t art and has 218 files. 2 files are missing from the artist. When doing a global search, they show up in a 3rd artist, “BBC - The Real Amos & Andy” but with the correctly tagged album of “Amos & Andy”. These should all be part of the same radio series, so they should never be splitting up like this. It’s like the local metadata scanner just gave up partway through, and it’s retaining whatever original data it managed to scrape online or whatever it has cached from the initial tags. Other artists show up similarly wonky. Some have each file as a separate album and each album is named the same thing, some have artists or albums that I have no idea where they came from, some have old metadata, but some are correct.

Sorry for the lengthy description but this has been several days’ worth of work, and I’ve done a lot of preliminary testing. I’m assuming whatever was used for encoding has restrictions, like a particular version of LAME or similar, and whenever I try to refresh it doesn’t capture the changes. Or, the local scanning agent just isn’t working at all. These are all MP3s but the bitrates and such are all over the place. I verified file/folder permissions are all set correctly, also.

Thank you for reading. Let me know if anyone has any suggestions.

TL;DR Can’t get 15000 MP3s to show up in Plex and it doesn’t seem to be reading the metadata correctly for all of them despite having the prefer local metadata switch enabled. Refreshing library, artist, or album doesn’t work. Albums and artists are split up in ways that don’t match the tags.

[DTR]

Did you also set the Album Artist field? Because that’s what Plex will use to match tracks to the right artist. So for Amos & Andy, if that’s the name of both the artist and album, based on the naming guidelines you would want something like this:

Music/
  Amos & Andy/
    Amos & Andy/
      001 - Episode 1.mp3
      ...
      224 - Episode 224.mp3

Where each track has the Album, Artist, and Album Artist tag set to ‘Amos & Andy’.

Along those same lines, if the album artist is different between tracks that are part of the same album, Plex won’t group them together. In those cases, you would want to set the Album Artist to ‘Various Artists’, and then specify the actual artist with the Artist tag.

[agentmith]

Just tried adding them to album artist, didn’t look like it made a difference. I go into the artist in Plex and refresh metadata there, the thing spins for a while on both albums but nothing changes. Historically when managing mp3s I’ve only ever used Artist and Album, ripping out the Album Artist to keep things tight and organized. What I find interesting is that the album art isn’t getting removed from a couple tracks too. This hasn’t changed from prior testing. This tells me that they aren’t scraping the data at all for some reason. Why, I don’t know.

As far as numbering files goes, there are far too many files for me to manage by hand, even with scripting. I can do group tag changes, but even that takes hours.

[agentmith]

Just tried adding some arbitrary track# tags and renamed to exactly follow Plex’s suggested naming convention. Same thing, refresh Amos & Andy Artist metadata, both albums spin like they’re being processed, but after it finishes nothing changes. All the tracks are in their original places. Some aspect of Plex isn’t reading the local metadata for some reason, and I can’t tell whether there’s something blocking it, if its a bug, or if there’s a technical limitation. If anyone can point me to how I find out more information about the technical aspects of how this works I can look into it further, I just don’t know what to look at or where.

[dbirch]

What kind of library did you setup?

I use Music, Personal Media Artist as the agent, and I also use prefer local metadata.

[DTR]

Does doing the Plex Dance with the album help at all? I just did some quick testing myself, and it did the right thing from the start:

[dbirch]

Dont use Plex Music it will attempt to match online.

[agentmith]

After much further troubleshooting I’ve finally figured it out. There are several things that need to be corrected, otherwise things will still appear in different albums.

1. If Artist was previously in Plex Library, move files out of library folder, rescan Library in Plex, and restart Plex service / reboot.
2. Remove all extended tags except TITLE, ALBUM, and ARTIST. Just to clarify, extended tags are not the traditional IDv3 tags. If you’re using Mp3Tag, you need to right click on the file and select Extended Tags… the regular tag fields on the left do not show everything. I have never needed to edit these before and didn’t know they were even a thing until I started digging into this issue.
3. Copy Album name to Album Artist.
4. Add track #s to correlate to correct order (it still wasn’t ordering tracks alphabetically, this was out of frustration mostly).

Only do a handful of folders at a time and rescan library, then verify. It’s safer this way, as bulk editing commonly resulted in things like extended tags being missed.

Literally all of these were required to get everything to match as intended, but I suspect extended tags were the main culprit as they were wildly inconsistent. I have never needed to do this much work to get a playlist working for something like Shoutcast, which just operates off of playlists or m3u files. This has been incredibly frustrating and time consuming, but at least it’s working now. Thank you to everyone for chiming in to assist.