What's the best way to add new songs, that don't belong to a specific album

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Server Version#: 1.21.1.3876
Player Version#: 4.50.1

Hi there,

I’m using Plex mainly for Movies and TV Shows which is working great… Now since Google killed off Play Music i’m testing Plex’s music library capabilities. I have to admit that it’s not a given but at the moment i have it all right and set up correctly… I adjusted all my metadata tags of all my songs via MusicBrainz Picard and mp3tag (if needed via Discogs), adapted the directory structure and changed title names as recommended (even though i prefer ‘local media assets’ agent) and added every album one by one to correct entries as needed.

Now fyi, i encountered a small bug concerning Various Artists and Album Artist Sort Order and Album Sort Order Tags that manifested itself by showing the last Album Artist name added, if that Album Artist Sort Order was set to Various Artists (by MusicBrainz)… So every time i tried to add a sampler album it showed the Album Artist name of the last added Sampler album, i had to trace back every sampler album where this was the case and finally Various Artists was available again and new samplers would than be named correctly. I decided however to not use Various Albums as naming concept and renamed the Album Artist Sort Order same as Album Artist (for samplers of course most of the time there is no real Album Artist and i simply used the Album Name or similar which is perfect for me)…

My main question however, as indicated in subject, is how to proceed for songs added on a daily basis without real album tags… For example i download songs from my Youtube subscriptions via my phone and add them to a specific server directory - in this case i gave the main folder the name of that Youtube Channel and the child folder (Album folder) the name of the respective Youtube playlist like so:

/music/Channel name/Playlist name/Artist - Title

I use 0 as Track number tag since there’s no need for ongoing numbers here… I decided to correctly adapt metadata tags (directly on my phone) before adding songs to that directory in the future.

So after scanning the library for new content, the newly added songs are indeed correctly added, but as a new album with the exact same information as the initial album. I than have to manually merge those albums in Plex for things to be like i want, which means as a single album…

What i want to avoid is to manually edit (merge) albums every time i add songs to that same folder… I know that Plex is meant to be a library manager for known Albums / Artists which is working great by the way, but maybe there’s a workaround for that little request of mine of adding new songs to self-defined albums…?

Any help is highly appreciated :wink:

Sincerely,

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Hey, thanks for your response,

unfortunately if there is no other way i’d still like to keep it some kind of a hotfolder or watchfolder where i can put in new stuff that i downloaded without specific album information (eventually and even quite often there is no album or it’s artists that are not referred to anywhere). I just made up the album artist name (my own username, don’t want to mix this up with Various Artists) and an album name (called it ‘Uploads’) and gave it some album art and now i just move the stuff i download every day from my phone to my pms in a specific directory (after filling the same tags for all these songs)… That’s also the reason i use 0 as track number since every new album per song crates a 1 as track number except if you define a specific number like 0). After a week or so i go to plex web to merge all the new songs and to refresh all the metadata from that folder (because of some bug that shows no song title after merging, the metadata refresh is necessary unfortunately…)

I think that’s fine for mee atm, but thanks for the info nonetheless :slight_smile:

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