I’ve been collecting music with common and premium libraries. The first uses last.fm tags. But the premium uses some data, which can’t be named strange or irrelevant. It’s a trash! I know last.fm, musicbrainz, discogs and other services, which contains different but real genres tags about artists and albums. But plex gains a trash for all artists. I use local track tags, so I see the horror only for artist genre tags, but it works for all tags. Examples:
The Frozen Autumn. http://www.last.fm/ru/music/The+Frozen+Autumn
Plex shows genres: Data & Other; Comedy, Spoken & Other
Last.fm shows genres: darkwave; synthpop; gothic; synth gothic; world music; electronic
Lord Wind. http://www.last.fm/ru/music/Lord+Wind
Plex shows genres: General Pop; Other Pop; Pop
Last.fm shows genres: dark ambient; ambient; neofolk; folk; medieval; poland
Tenhi. http://www.last.fm/ru/music/Tenhi
Plex shows genres: Ethnic/Ancient Fusion Art Rock; Dream Pop & Shoegazer; Indie
Last.fm shows genres: neofolk; dark folk; folk; ambient; finnish; dark ambient
It’s the model case, when some paid/premium feature works worse than free/common.
Premium libraries get metadata from Gracenote, unless you tell it to use Last.FM or to prefer embedded tags. In my experience, neither Last.FM nor Gracenote are reliable. They both have garbage info in their databases, because they both originated from databases that any user could contribute to, and they’ve never cleaned up the garbage. They are especially terrible with classical music, but I’ve seen garbage in all genres.
My recommendation for issues like this is always to get a good ID3 tag editor (EasyTag, MP3Tag, Puddletag, TagScanner, etc.) and make sure the tags embedded in your music files is in good shape, then tell Plex to prefer embedded tags, and don’t use genre info from the online services.
That can be a ton of work up front, but once it is done, it is much easier to maintain. My headaches with metadata are all but gone.
@beckfield said:
tags embedded in your music files is in good shape, then tell Plex to prefer embedded tags, and don’t use genre info from the online services
Exactly! I do it many years to be independent of similar services. But Plex doesn’t use artist data from embedded tags, so I see the horrors of genres, described above.
I have noticed the exact same thing with genres. I have almost 200k tracks and I use basic lastfm library by choice because it is better with the genre tags. And put in your own fanart.tv api key and it looks just as pretty as premium as well.
Lastfms genres can be a bit goofy sometimes, but they are overall accurate, and works very well in a big library. I agree the premium genres are completely worthless, which is a real bummer.
