Server Version#: 4.117.2
Player Version#: 4.117.2
I think I tried Plex before and ran into this same issue which is why I had to use MyMedia (no longer supported) to be able to play my music on Alexa.
So just installed 4.117.2 and am trying to setup my music library. I’ve turned on the desire to use embedded data in the files not downloaded information. I’m an oldie, so not much interested in learning about new and related music, etc… I just want to listen to my songs. I’ve carefully crafted the embedded data so that artists are stored lastname, firstname and song and album titles have articles (a, an, the) at the end of the name so everything sorted correctly. Billy Joel under “J”, not “B”, for example.
Likewise, my folder structure is arranged logically by high level genre, then letter folders A-Z for artists. Artists with larger numbers of songs get their own sub-folders, but that’s it. There has never been a need for folder per album, track number in the name of the file etc… that’s what the embedded tags are for. When there is a case of a song with the same title being on two different albums, that’s resolved with the title getting a small [ABBR] at the end of the file name where ABBR is a quick mnemonic for the album it’s on. This gives each copy of the song it’s own distinct file name so they can co-exist in the single artist folder.
Windows reads meta data and allows the folder to be sorted by album name in the embedded tags.
I know some people over the years have used the folder-folder-folder nesting (nonsense IMO) for years and I’ve always had to retrain my ripping programs to rip the physical media to a single folder and create the proper tags in the files.
All this said, agree or disagree, that’s fine. The net result is that while Plex allows for the reading of embedded meta data, it does seem to want to force it’s own physical file structure onto the import process. I really hope it’s not and I’m missing something so I can use Plex with my library as is. I don’t want to change my working library just for Plex and it’s seems silly to have to create a second copy of everything just because of this (seeming) design flaw.
It reads SOME of the files (none are in the album folder structure, so it does read some of them somehow). But when I did a refresh all meta data – thinking that would do what it says it would do – Plex still has the artists jumbled together, with a single album, the wrong artist names, etc…
The meta data is of course 100% correct, so it’s not that. It just seems odd that it claims to read it, but won’t actually use it to create the Plex database of songs.
PLEASE tell me I’m missing something and Plex is not set up this narrow. I’d really love to be able to use it with my existing library.
THANKS!!!
