The problem I have with this answer is that “This doesn’t work in Plex anymore.” is the actual truth.
I added parts of my very large music collection when it was in beta, 8?-9? years ago. I have 1500 singles in folders by decades "70s, 80s, 90s, etc. Each folder is added to Plex. They all have been recognized for YEARS. My Artist fields have the artist(a) (ID’ing collaborators in ARTIST not TITLE). I have singles and 12inches in the specific artist’s folder. All of it has worked in Plex for years.
One-two years ago, I guess, the code was revamped, improved, and PLEX reduced what it could handle correctly understand. The code is only capable of reading this rigid, computer-generated folder structure. The idea that I am going to build 1500 folders of artists, then build 1500 folders of the album/single to put in a single song is laughable. If I need a media program to organize my file structure in order for another media program to understand them… then that first media program is probably much richer than plex as a player. (such as iTunes). BTW I turn off iTunes file organization (which looks to be what plex is modeling after) and iTunes understands all the music in these human-oriented folder structures for the last 15 years. So, it’s never been some impossible task.
Maybe it was the rollout of their own agents. I know movies aren’t be matched if they have any punctuation in them (:.!#$) because the match feature removes those before searching, resulting in 0 matches. If I add the colon in the manual search options, those match fine. That breaking seems to have occurred around the time Plex Music began being endlessly confused by new files, but NOT confused by all the existing that don’t follow the rigid structure. I switched off Plex Movie because matches were failing on movies too often.
Now, when I put the KYGO & Whitney Houston single in a “WHITNEY HOUSTON” artist folder with a dozen albums under it and singles and 12 inches (with multiple Artists in 15-20 of the songs), Plex now says that Whitney Houston is a white guy from Norway. There is no justification for this bizarre logic. You have ID’d 100 songs in an artist folder as the real Whitney Houston, but now you don’t change the name of the artist, but the plex displayed info changes to CONFLICT with the ARTIST FOLDER name. So what’s the point of demanding we have artist folders if plex then finds reasons to ignore it? It is a rhetorical question. The bar was just lowered.
It has always frustrated me that resources were funneled to a mediocre to basic music offering, (iTunes 10 years ago is more capable than Plex now) while basic video features are still languishing after years of waiting.
