Where does Plex get its music information from? I go to IMDB to make sure my movies match what it says, I go to TheTvdb for TV Shows, correcting episode numbers when necessary.
I’m having albums in my Music, properly sorted and labeled, moved into other albums automatically. What database can I look at to see where Plex is getting its info?
Take a look at the file tags / metadata
There are several metadata agents available for music:
My understanding is that the “Plex Music” agent uses Musicbrainz and AllMusic.
It was explained to me like this:
roughly like this:
- musicbrainz is the center of the universe
- musicbrainz links with TiVo nee AllMusic via
a) exact matching if MB has a link to artist/album
b) “fuzzy” matching if not- musicbrainz links with last.fm directly for popular track data
- musicbrainz links with fanart.tv for graphics
Plex will get artwork and metadata from Musicbrainz if it’s there. It gets artist biographies and album reviews from AllMusic if it’s there, and I think it will fall back to last.FM if AllMusic has nothing.
I should also note that Plex will have difficulty finding a correct match if your files don’t meet Plex’s naming conventions.
The tags/metadata do not count if it’s found in the database.
For example, there is a group called Undercover. The first 4 albums they released were:
-Undercover
-God Rules
-Boys and Girls-Renounce the World
In 1988 they released 2 compilation albums: Volume 1 (contains the first 2 albums in their entirety), and Volume 2 (contains the 3rd and 4th albums). EVERYTHING (metadata and filenames and folders) were set for Vol 1 and 2. When Plex read it, it labeled them as from a later compilation call Anthology Volume 1, which contained all 4 albums as one album.
I know how it works, thanks. I mentioned it because someone who had asked the same question was sourcing from tags because of the way his agents were set up.
What I don’t understand is how Plex gets the wrong data when matching an artist properly.
I have several artists that have the exact same name that other, more popular artist.
After unmatching, refreshing, and manually matching with the correct artist, after a refresh it gets the wrong artist bio.
It’s weird because it does get the correct graphics for the artist, it just messes up the bio. Or it gives a disambiguation with a full list of the artists sharing the name
That’s because bio’s are sourced from allmusic. So the artist’s record on Musicbrainz must have a link to the appropriate artist record on allmusic.
If there is none, Plex is falling back to last.fm
And last.fm don’t have separate records for artists of the same name. So the bio’s on there tend to mention several different artists of that name.
Sometimes Musicbrainz relies on Wikipedia/Wikidata for biographies too, and MB is regularly curated so most of the time the info is correct. It could be nice to have it fallback to wiki first and then to last.fm, just to avoid this issue.
EDIT: Example of an artist that has this issue
You can always use the MusicBrains Picard application to save the Metadata in the files you self and just have plex get the data from the embedded tags,.
it can be a time consuming task but worth when you have a huge collection music gathered over a lifetime, and you wouldn’t have to rely on plex to do the job
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