I have some problems with Plex after adding a lot of ripped studio albums, so if anyone in here uses Plex, please give me a holler. Or should I use another program to stream music from my media-player (PC) to my TV?
I donât personally use Plex, but I know weâve got several Plex users on here, including @Silver_Skree and I think @Beckfield?
whatâs the problem youâre running into?
I donât personally run the server I use, but depending on the problem, thereâs a chance I might be able to help. Whatâs up?
I got 2 problems.
So I ripped and added some 6500 songs from studio albums, and placed them in the fol,der Studio Albums under my Music folder (Windows 10). All of them were run trough Picard, to clean up, and in a few cases manually change tags (I hate having a musician turn up several times because of collaborations with other musicians, so I change tags to prevent this).
My first problem is that Billy Joel turns up twice, once for his own albums and once for âFantasies & Delusionsâ, a collaboration where I changed all 5 album and artist tags. Plex still puts it ny itself, but still as Billy Joel.
The second is that Boz Scaggs is placed under Bruce Springsteen, together with Bruce. No taggs changed anywhere on these 2.
Iâve started to wonder if I have to many files connected to Plex. ON my MediaServer (PC) I have around 2-2.500 movies, series, and music files. On my gaming PC I have about 8.000 music files connected.
Itâs not a problem of having too many files, for sure; Plex can handle large media libraries like a champ.
Bob Scaggs being listed under Bruce Sprigsteen is a mystery to me, but just to double-check, when you changed Fantasies & Delusions, did you change the Sort name fields in the metadata for all of those files as well?
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I tried using Plex as my music library and just couldnât get on with it - namely for the exact reasons you have here! I actually ended up on MBz because of my problems with Plex (and in turn my on-going issues with Discogs, but thatâs another story).
I actually have had this issue with video content as well in Plex, i think its more Plex and less MBz that is doing it.
One time when it really fudged up badly (by creating about 100 âvarious artistâ entries for no logical reason) I ended up just deleting all of the program files, and let Plex âre-buildâ its entire database from scratch overnight. Itâs not a good solution, but it worked for a bit until it stumbled into creating more strange duplicates.
There are people who are vehemently against Plex (especially since some of these ânewâ features that seem to smell a lot like corporate meddling) and suggest Kodi; but I canât speak for it as I never used it.
For myself I just went back to handling my music in ânormalâ music library software; firstly MediaMonkey and now MusicBee.
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Iâve had a few friends recommend Jellyfin as a free and open-source alternative to Plex, for when you really want to run your own self-curated streaming media library but donât want to pay for a Plex pass to get their good apps and features 
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I ended up deleting the folder from Plex (not the folder on the disk) and rebuild it, which turned out fine, so far.
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And when adding posters (since I use local files I have to add everything manually) Fleetwood Mac and Bryan Ferry merged.
Plex deals surprisingly well with big libraries, in the terabyte range, so the volume isnât a problem.
For future reference Plex has some pretty good guides here. Note that even with embedded tags checked in options you can get issues if you donât use their recommended file structure (shown here). Which is basically the default MusicBrainz/Picard structure (Artist/Album/01 Track).
Glad rebuilding/re-scanning worked!
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I already use the default structure. I had to go back to Last.fm as DB, but that DB is almost as bad as Plexâ own DB. Take an example of 10CC, only 1 or 2 of their albums came up with the correct year, and some of them are even impossible to manually match to the correct year. Other than that Last.fm seems to work, I just donât understand that a music DB donât have the correct release years. Oh, and I donât think it even look at tags for year, label or anything else.
It sounded like you have some extra folders in there - e.g. one called âstudio albumsâ?
Regardless, glad it works now, nobody wants to rearrange their filling system for Plex if they can help it.
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Iâm using PlexâŚIâm not a long-time user but I have a suggestion. Go to the area where maintenance items are available. They have two maintenance items you can run especially when you have added large amounts of music. One, I believe, is for cleaning the spools and a DB option. Run both and that may help. I have around 8K songs and it doesnât take long.
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