After a long time trying to get Gracenote to recognize all my songs I conducted an experiment. I had a large amount of oldies all in Flac format. I put them in a new library and -none- were recognized by Gracenote. (no moods, no plex-mix). I thought perhaps Gracenote did not recognize Flac so I converted all to MP3. Still no Gracenote recognition.
I then took song and copied to a folder outside of Plex and used Plex to delete the song from the database (and, of course, from the folder). I used Puddletag to remove all the tags I could find. Then I put the song back into the Plex folder and had Plex do an update. Plex found an artist and album for the song. It -also- found Gracenote information and I was able to use both moods and Plex-mix.
So I copied a different song from the folder, deleted it with Plex, made sure the library itself did not have the box marked to use tags if available and brought it into the library, updated the database and I got nothing from Gracenote.
So it appears that even with the library instructed to NOT use tags, it must be using them anyway. (Further evidence of that is the album entry from Plex used “[no album]” as the album name which is the way the album tag for the song is written.)
So, the question is…Which tag is it that is blocking Gracenote from functioning? Once I know that, I can ensure it is not ever set on items I put into the data base.
Thanks. I will give that a try later this afternoon. At least I have a list of potential offenders.
I’m willing to concede that my quest to get Gracenote to work properly is approaching an obsession. But when one has a library of nearly twenty thousand songs, it is impossible to take the time to manually create playlists which may well match one’s mood and still have time to listen to that playlist.
With moods, I can just dial up a mood and go about listening. But I KNOW that right now a very high percentage of my library (I’m guessing 30+ percent) will never play. That same amount will never play if I hear a song that I want to use to launch a Plex-Mix with.
These songs causing trouble are not weird songs no one has heard of. All of them can be matched by either Musicbrainz or acoustid and most often by both.
Gracenote appears to not offer their services outside of the corporate arena which means I can’t just use the service as an individual without going through a company like Plex. If I’m reduced to just relying on tags to make Plex function I might as well just use any old -free- player.
Plex advertised this feature as a reason to purchase a pass. I purchased it and -then- discovered it doesn’t work the way they said it did. Honestly, I feel like the guy who ordered a Shelby Mustang and was delivered a Pinto.
But I do appreciate your help and will sit down either later today or tomorrow and run through your ideas. There MUST be a reason why Gracenote doesn’t find a match with the tagged version and does with a completely blank slate.
I give up. Nothing makes any sense. I was using “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by Elvis to test with. MusicBrainz Picard identified it with the correct artist and title. It said it was from a 12" single. Gracenote, one time, identified it as “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by Time Life and showed me an album cover when I played it by John Paul Young. According to Discogs that album doesn’t even have that song on it. But, Gracenote was happy to give me moods and Plex-mix data for that song.
Plex can keep my money. Maybe they will buy the programmers some coffee or something. I’m back to Kodi. At least I’ve discovered some tools which will help straighten out my tagging so Kodi will be happier. One of them will calculate ReplayGain information to stabilize the volumes. And Kodi likes ReplayGain.
