I noticed quite a few mismatches in my Music library recently so I updated the music files and tagged with MusicBrainz Album Artist and Album ID’s where there were mismatches. I’ve got “Prefer local metadata” checked, but the scanner still doesn’t seem to pick up the MusicBrainzID’s. It appears to just be searching MusicBrainz on it’s own and finding a match based on artist or album name, rather than using the more accurate MusicBrainzID’s that are embedded in some of my files. Does it only use the embedded MusicBrainzID’s when it doesn’t find a match automatically? I thought it would use MusicBrainzID’s first, but it doesn’t appear to be doing that since I have to rematch after the scan is done.
Hmm, I just confirmed that it should be finding the MBID in an embedded tag.
The first thing I would suggest is making sure Plex is fully configured to prefer embedded tags (it’s more than just that checkbox).
Have you tried using the Fix Match command and inserting the Album MBID in the ‘Album’ field? I’d be curious if it is more successful.
Awesome HowTo, thanks! Yes, I’ve followed all those steps. For the Album Art I use Plex and Local. Album Art seems to be the main thing that doesn’t get populated, but a Fix Match or Unmatch fixes it quickly. So I guess that it’s working, but what it might be doing is looking for local Album Art first, and stops since it doesn’t find any local Album Art. I’ll try adding some local album art to the ones that aren’t showing up and try again.
Overall it works extremely well and I really like being able to add my local metadata to the scanning process. My music library is so much better organized than it was before. 
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Yes really good doc @beckfield thank you
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I just found an Album without art, but it was also missing the MusicBrainzID. I added the MusicBrainzID, refreshed metadata, and the album art was added. Seems to be working. Maybe some just get missed on the initial scan.
Working with this a little bit more, the only issue that I’ve found is when an album that should be together ends up split after the initial scan because of missing data. Adding the MusicBrainzID and disc number doesn’t pull them together automatically. A manual merge is needed, which is still easy and once the MusicBrainzID and disc numbers are in there, it likely wouldn’t be an issue if deleting the library and recreating.
You don’t necessarily have to go so far as to delete the library and rebuild it. You can usually move the album out of the folder monitored by the library, scanning for files (so Plex will remove the album from the database), then moving it back and scanning again.
Yep, got it. I started with a pretty big mess so starting over from scratch was a bit easier. And I was curious to see how well it would match things up after adding MusicBrainzID’s. Why doesn’t it combine albums though after adding the same MusicBrainzID for multiple discs? Shouldn’t it do that without the Plex Dance? Maybe not, but it would be nice if the scan could pick up the fact that the 2 albums are the same based on finding the same MusicBrainzID.
They made great strides to eliminate the Plex Dance when they wrote the new music scanner in 2019, but there are still a few situations where it’s still necessary.
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Yea, it does seem to work better than I remember. I’ve been using Emby for the past year, but have come back to Plex and see a lot of improvements across the different library types. I’m very pleased to see how well things are working. Still more to do of course, and really wish I could import m3u playlists and play them on DLNA, but other than that, things are working really well.
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