Unwanted metadata

[del_f7]

Plex is adding unwanted metadata to my albums. Not only is this infuriating because it’s inaccurate but it’s doubly infurating because I’ve taken every step I know how to take to stop Plex interfering with my library.

Is there anything I can do to stop it without having to go through every one of thousands of albums & do it individually?

I currently have the agent set to “Plex Music”. The alternative is “Plex Personal Media” but I seem to recall that some of the other options that present themselves with the “Plex Music” agent (which I can then switch off - like artist bios, reviews, etc. - or make choices - like “local files only” -) disappear when I select the alternative.

For example, the added record label & style in the screenshots below:

Also, possibly a separate question but I seem to recall seeing somewhere that I can switch off the year (which shows as 1963 in these screenshots)?

Did I imagine that or is it actually an option somewhere?

[OttoKerner]

Record label and release year can be overwritten with embedded meta tags.

[del_f7]

I’m not sure that solves my problem. These details are not in my tags - nor do I want them there - so I don’t know why Plex is choosing to add them when I’ve asked - in so far as there are options to do so - that it only uses my metadata.

Unless I’ve misunderstood you?

[OttoKerner]

You cannot turn off metadata. You can only override them, if Plex is fetching them wrong from its online database.

[del_f7]

Okay, thanks. I mean, to me that seems like a very simple fix. Just allow me to tell Plex to never fetch anything from an online database. Simple. One switch.

[drzoidberg33]

The solution is to use the Plex Personal Media agent, but then you said you want things like bios and reviews which are online and require the Plex Music agent.

Unfortunately you can’t specify specific fields to be omitted from the agent.

[nx6]

@del_f7

Is there anything I can do to stop it without having to go through every one of thousands of albums & do it individually?

I have “Prefer local metadata” turned on and Genres set to use embedded tags. When I used the Plex Music agent for metadata I kept coming across albums and even individual songs matched wrong because Plex was matching the album to a different version than what I had (different edition, or a version for another geographic market) so there were times I literally could not find a song because the Plex server had it listed as the wrong track. I couldn’t Fix Match those issues away always, like there would be no match that had the tracks in the order they were in my library (and I’m not changing my file tags to match a different CD).

[del_f7]

@drzoidberg33

The solution is to use the Plex Personal Media agent, but then you said you want things like bios and reviews which are online and require the Plex Music agent.

No, I absolutely don’t want those! I don’t want anything except the metadata I add to the files.

My libraries are currently set like this:

And yet, when I go into an album I see this:

Those “extras” the record label & style, I haven’t added those. They’re not in my tags but Plex has seen fit to go & grab information just for the sake of cluttering up my page.

I can go in & remove them, of course, as I’m doing now, every time I add an album, but I have, like 20,000 albums in my library. It’s just not realistic for me to go in & do that manually for every album.

[del_f7]

@drzoidberg33

The solution is to use the Plex Personal Media agent

I just created a test library using the Plex Personal Media Agent & that does appear to be exacly whst I want, thanks! I’ll try adding more albums & see what happens.

[del_f7]

Yeah, it’s still doing it, unfortunately. I’ve just created a fresh library that uses the Plex Personal Media Agent, I took this album out of the previous library, took it into Yate to strip out the dates & added it to the new library.

What’s it doing? It’s finding a date. And a record label.

[drzoidberg33]

That’s in your metadata somewhere then.

[del_f7]

Fantastic! Thanks to you I’ve just learned something new about Yate, too! Thanks.

[del_f7]

There is one strange thing that’s happening.

Now that I’ve figured out how to get an album into Yate and “see all tags”, so that I can easily clear out anything unwanted, my Plex interface looks the way I want it to.

But… When I choose “edit” & look at what Plex has behind the scenes…

Check it out:

Firstly, it’s duplicated the album title into a “sort album” field but, weirdly, it’s added a date in there of “1969-12-31” & it’s done that to every single album!!

WTF? That’s definitely not in my tags & god knows what that date relates to!

[Divideby0]

AI result, trimmed for clarity:

When you see December 31, 1969 on an file, it isn’t an anomaly. It is a technical glitch indicating the file’s timestamp was reset to zero. This happens because Unix computers calculate time by tracking seconds from Jan 1, 1970. In the Americas, time zone offsets push this “zero second” back one

I think that Plex looks at the empty “Release Date” metadata field and reads it as a zeroed out Epoch time. It must have a release date (why?), so it just uses Epoch time.
Solution? Provide a date in your metadata.

Oh, and FYI, the Plex Music Agent still attempts to match your files against that of online databases. Checking the “Prefer local metadata” means that Plex will use your file’s metadata if it exists for a file. It then attempts to match that against online sources. So if you have nothing in a field, Plex will ignore that field, and use the filename to match, which can get you bad results.

If you use the Plex Music Agent and want local metadata, you either must always use proper naming conventions, or intentionally use incorrect metadata names in the title and album fields so the match fails and your metadata is the only information used. I do not use proper naming conventions, so I make sure that the “Album” fields and genres always match the folder scheme I use. It’s a bit of a pain, so your choice to use a Personal Media Agent is good.

[del_f7]

Thanks!

My main reason for the OP was that I was seeing information when I looked at an album in Plex that I didn’t want to see. Record labels, genres etc. It turns out that these were all in my metadata but I had no idea, because they weren’t in the fields I was routinely looking at to process my albums. To be fair, as I don’t see this “odd date” unless I look “under the hood”, I’m not too bothered.

Historically, there are a couple of (not particularly interesting) things that led me here:

I used to use Roon. Roon would look at the date first as a way of sorting but it did not play at all well with an incomplete date, which led to albums being out of chronological release order. Sometimes, particularly with older albums, there simply isn’t date beyond the year so you had to make one up, which I was not happy doing. Because of this, (& because I’m a bit bloody minded), I started using my date of birth for everything. This made the “date” field essentially invisible to Roon as all the dates were the same. As a result, Roon defaulted to its next delineator - the album title - and I ended up developing a very simple system where the “album title” & “album artist” fields did all the heavy lifting, which saves me hours in tagging because I give all the album folders the name I want & just clear out most of the other fields. I have an action in Yate to bring in the folder name & use it as the album title. Simples.

The date of birth entry didn’t really interfere with Roon, as it was out of the way but when it came to Plex, I was seeing 1963 (this being my birth year… I know, older than god, etc.) right in the middle of everything, so with this new idea of using a different agent in Plex & stripping out all the unwanted metadata to clean up the interface, I figured “why not strip out my date of birth too, while I’m at it?”

This is obviously what’s led to the unexpected appearance of the 1969 date.

I suppose I could get an action to take the release date from the beginning of the album title & use it in the date field but… Well, as it’s already right there in the album title, it would just be there twice.

When I have multiple versions of an album, they sort quite nicely by just using the data string in my album titles.

[Divideby0]

That sounds good to me. I have my own music organizational structure, left over from when I used to collect/download MP3s of my favorite game music. I rarely like an album’s entire selection (and detest having files I will never listen to), so I either have to use incomplete albums with a song or 10 missing, or use my own custom “album” which is really just more or less the genre I feel the song is under, and plop the song into an ever-growing single folder.

As long as you use one consistent date, then “release date” sorting should still sort in a useful way with album name as a secondary sort order. I was just explaining where the release date of 1969 came from. I am glad you are okay with it being “wrong” as long as every file is the same wrongness. The alternative is to delete the field in the Plex UI after a file has been added, and to lock the field to prevent further scans filling the field again from a zero-Epoch field in the SQL database.

[del_f7]

Yeah, as long as I can’t see it, I don’t really mind.

Really appreciated the explanation of where it came from.

Thanks again.