I generally like Plex, but the management of music is pretty bad; I’ve got a massive music collection that’s meticulously organized and properly tagged, with high-quality embedded artwork. Plex still can’t do basic stuff like use embedded artwork, or give us useful ways of sorting our music.
With the release of PlexAmp, can we please finally get music library management that isn't terrible?
Can you be a bit more specific? I have a fairly large music collection (~5000 albums) and it works quite well for me, but I don’t rely 100% on tags, personally.
If your stuff is meticulously tagged, we generally recommend using the “respect tags” option when making a library, it will ensure that Plex defers to your existing tags as much as possible.
We should be able to read embedded artwork just fine, but perhaps you’re using a format we don’t support?
As for “useful ways of sorting” there are lots of ways to sort and filter and make smart playlists, so you’d have to be more specific.
Bottom line ~ help us help you 
Thanks for your reply, elan.
I’ve added a Music library to Plex, but the media management is pretty bad… Use embedded tags is checked for the library; I have all of my Agents set up to prioritize Local Media Assets, but Plex still insists on using it’s own garbage thumbnails for album covers. Embedded artwork is always saved as a jpeg/jpg. Plex often won’t even recognize the embedded artwork; it insists on using its own scraped artwork.
Sorting is terrible – if I sort by Artists, Plex doesn’t sort using the actual “Artist” info, it sorts by the “Album Artist” info; if I sort by Album > By Album Artist, it prioritizes by Album Artist, instead of by Artist. Soundtrack or compilation albums are all organized together under a generic “Various Artists” catch-all, so if I’m looking for, say, the soundtrack to ‘Blade 2’, it doesn’t show up in “B” for ‘Blade 2’, it’s shunted down at the bottom of the list, buried in a hundred other “Various Artists” albums.
So, let’s say I have a series of albums by an artist named, say, “Basalt Rock Formations”. The albums are organized on the HDD by Music/artist/album (Music/Basalt Rock Formations/Album1, Music/Basalt Rock Formations/Album2, etc.); they’re tagged as Album - Album1, Artist - Basalt Rock Formations, Album Artist - Frank, Bill, Jonesy —Album - Album2, Artist - Basalt Rock Formations, Album Artist - Jeff, Frank, Bill, Jonesy (the hypothetical band has added a member), etc/
In Plex, sorting by Album > By Album Artist, the albums are nowhere near each other, with Album1 sorted under "Frank, Bill, Jonesy:, and Album2 sorted under “Jeff, Frank, Bill, Jonesy”, not having both of them grouped as “Basalt Rock Formations”. Same thing when sorting by Artist; Plex is reading them as two different artists, “Frank, Bill, Jonesy” and “Jeff, Frank, Bill, Jonesy”, rather than recognizing them as “Basalt Rock Formations”.
Does anyone know how to get Plex to work properly, so that it actually recognizes embedded metadata, and sorts properly, or at least sorts in a semi-useful fashion?
I’m running Version 1.10.1.4602 on a Windows 10 box, btw.
Obviously, I get that the “Album > By Album Artist” sorting is working as expected, but it seems like sorting “Album > By Artist” would be way more useful.
Sure, so to reply to the concerns:
I think all of your sorting woes boil down to a single thing: We don’t have good support for track artists (what you’re calling plain artists). As you’ve said, the “By Album Artist” performs as advertised, you’re just looking for the ability to work with track artists. We may improve support for this scenario in the future.
As for the artwork issue, if you’d zip up an album for us to try over here, we’ll attempt to reproduce the issue.
The album art is not working properly for all of my albums, not just a select few. I’ve spent the past couple of days going through the various Plex forums online, trying to find solutions to my various music library problems; it seems like the album artwork problem has been an issue for literally years…
There is a Plex Ninja in there giving advice on how to get it working. Have you tried his suggestions in the thread? Are you willing to zip up a complete album, as well as give platform details so we can try to help out?
Opus support also need improvement. Per now, Plex won’t read the tags from the opus/ogg container, and more often than not it transcodes even though the client do have opus decode capability.
@olavrb ~ Off-topic 
and more details would be helpful, like naming the clients which have issues.
@elan said:
@olavrb ~ Off-topicand more details would be helpful, like naming the clients which have issues.
Well, this also affects the plexamp app. Try to play opus files with it, tags won’t show. There is also these threads:
"Direct play Opus on Android and Windows [APP]”
http://forums.plex.tv/discussion/258931/direct-play-opus-on-android-and-windows-app#
“PMS won’t read vorbis tags from .opus files”
http://forums.plex.tv/discussion/258362/pms-wont-read-vorbis-tags-from-opus-files
“Read vorbis tags from Opus files (OGG container)”
http://forums.plex.tv/discussion/258924/read-vorbis-tags-from-opus-files-ogg-container
“Sync Opus to Android without transcoding”
http://forums.plex.tv/discussion/261999/sync-opus-to-android-without-transcoding
Thanks, @olavrb, I’ve filed internal issues for these.
@Sprongfeld ~ Would still be up for helping figure out why your albums aren’t getting the embedded artwork, if you’d be willing to zip up a directory with one.
@elan are there any plans to include Alexa / Google Home integration with the music library?
@Goonbridge ~ could you be more specific? Alexa works great with the Plex music library (you can play on device, or instruct it to play remotely).
@elan I use a Google Home myself - as far as I’m aware there is no support for Google Home and Plex. (Awesome that Alexa has it already though).
Just looking to play music via Plex
Yeah, sorry, no support for Google Home (yet, at least).
Hey Elan, I’ve send you a DM with one of the tracks from the screenshot I’d posted; properly tagged with embedded 1000x1000 pix album artwork in jpeg format. Plex won’t even acknowledge that there’s custom artwork in the file when I try to manually edit the tracks. Again, all of my server settings are set to prefer LMA
Some thoughts for things that would make the music library management more useful:
- fixing LMA
- add ability to sort by Album > Artist
- fix alphabetical sorting – why is ‘A Tribe Called Quest’ listed under “T”, and ‘A Perfect Circle’ under “P”?
- in sort by Album, have albums appear in chronological order. The PlexPass “Premium” music library is supposed to scrape extra metadata for everything; surely it scrapes album release dates?
- have ‘Various Artists’ albums sorted into the mix alphabetically in Album sorting view. As an example, the list would show Andrew Bird > Blade 2 OST > Charli XCX. This is admittedly a tougher ask, since it’d involve some sort of code that would force Plex to sort anything tagged with “Various Artists” by “Album Title” instead…
@elan said:
Can you be a bit more specific? I have a fairly large music collection (~5000 albums) and it works quite well for me, but I don’t rely 100% on tags, personally.If your stuff is meticulously tagged, we generally recommend using the “respect tags” option when making a library, it will ensure that Plex defers to your existing tags as much as possible.
We should be able to read embedded artwork just fine, but perhaps you’re using a format we don’t support?
As for “useful ways of sorting” there are lots of ways to sort and filter and make smart playlists, so you’d have to be more specific.
Bottom line ~ help us help you
Plex really needs a “Composer” tag, which I believe is already included in modern file tags anyway. This is essential for classical, but actually quite useful for any genre because of cover songs. Most every modern media player has this, even Windows Media. A “Conductor” tag would be nice, though less essential.
Better support for additional contributing artists would be good too, as Sprongfeld alluded to.
@Sprongfeld said:
Hey Elan, I’ve send you a DM with one of the tracks from the screenshot I’d posted; properly tagged with embedded 1000x1000 pix album artwork in jpeg format. Plex won’t even acknowledge that there’s custom artwork in the file when I try to manually edit the tracks.
And I replied, since the track worked perfectly for me in Plex extracting that artwork. I’ll need more input from you on what could possibly be different about your setup.
- fixing LMA
As I explained, I’ll need further input from you, since it’s working over here.
- add ability to sort by Album > Artist
I assume you mean by track artist, as we discussed before.
- fix alphabetical sorting – why is ‘A Tribe Called Quest’ listed under “T”, and ‘A Perfect Circle’ under “P”?
This is a feature; if you don’t don’t like it, you can edit the Sort Title and change how the sorting works.
- in sort by Album, have albums appear in chronological order. The PlexPass “Premium” music library is supposed to scrape extra metadata for everything; surely it scrapes album release dates?
That sounds like a good suggestion, I’ll file it internally.
- have ‘Various Artists’ albums sorted into the mix alphabetically in Album sorting view. As an example, the list would show Andrew Bird > Blade 2 OST > Charli XCX. This is admittedly a tougher ask, since it’d involve some sort of code that would force Plex to sort anything tagged with “Various Artists” by “Album Title” instead…
Yeah, that is tougher for sure; you can customize sort order for each artist already when you’re viewing their albums (edit ⇢ advanced) but it’s harder in a single grid view.
