Best setup for ~3TB of wav files on hard drive

[Bucknekked]

MusicBrainz Picard, you just have to screw with it and see. You can generally drag entire hierarchies of music files into Picard, then right-click and choose "lookup". Some will succeed, and others will fail. The ones that fail, try right-clicking and choosing "scan", which takes a little longer but offers maybe a higher success rate or something? In any case, Picard is completely free.

To try and solve my enormously irritating experience importing my music files in to Plex (the metadata, album covers etc are messed up nearly 75% of the time) I installed Musicbrainz Picard. It seems to work, but, it doesn't solve the problem with Plex and metadata. I can import songs in to Picard pretty easy. It will find tons of good stuff about the songs. But Plex completely ignores the stuff. Or, more properly stated, it will ignore most of it and seemingly accept some at random.

I have figured out that once Plex reads in an album, it will not look at the metatags again unless the file alteration date changes. So, you have to delete everything and then reload the song after Picard does its thing. Plex still ignores the metatags. I think Picard is working. I think Plex is not. That's just me and I'm pretty frustrated with tags and Plex at the moment.

 

[Spinningbull]

Spinningbull
I too have a Synology NAS unit where I put all my music files. I am experimenting with leaving iTunes and looking for a music manager with a future (iTunes being at end of life). So I also loaded Plex since it will run native on the NAS and cover all my in home devices and players. Plex runs everywhere.

Your comments on Plex handing meta data on music couldn't be further from my experience this week. The Plex pass promises "music fingerprinting" where they sample the tunes and provide the metadata based on an internet database. My experience with Plex and movies has been without incident: it all works and the metadata is handled well. My experience with music and tagging has been nothing short of awful with Plex.

I wish I could say "here's the problem.......", but, there's so many problems with Plex and music tags that it would be hard to say. It manages to get nearly everything wrong (with ID3 tags) and does it in a pattern I have yet to discern.

I would be interested in the experiences with Plex and music tagging of others. The forums for Plex are repleat with people saying pretty terrible things about the same topic. Not much in the way of fixes coming out from Plex. Anybody else tried this with Plex? Am I barking up the wrong tree for music on Plex?

So my environment is hard to compare for the issues you're running into.

My library of music has been built over many years, and went through multiple different tools getting the metadata set.

The other issue is, I use both plex and roon on the same library. Roon is amazing at metadata matching, and updates the files. So the success I've had with plex is likely entirely related to roon doing the heavy lifting. But as an example, the artist page brings great additional data.

And, I don't remember ever having to 'fix match' with albums I rip, and that's pretty routine with movies I rip.

To be honest though, if roon worked outside my home network, I'd never use plex for music. It's that much better. I even built dedicated rpi roon boxes for all the rooms in the house so I can use it exclusively for home listening.

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[Bucknekked]

So my environment is hard to compare for the issues you're running into.

My library of music has been built over many years, and went through multiple different tools getting the metadata set.

The other issue is, I use both plex and roon on the same library. Roon is amazing at metadata matching, and updates the files. So the success I've had with plex is likely entirely related to roon doing the heavy lifting. But as an example, the artist page brings great additional data.

And, I don't remember ever having to 'fix match' with albums I rip, and that's pretty routine with movies I rip.

To be honest though, if roon worked outside my home network, I'd never use plex for music. It's that much better. I even built dedicated rpi roon boxes for all the rooms in the house so I can use it exclusively for home listening.

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Thanks for the update. I am sitting here this morning struggling with Plex and tags. It doesn't seem to matter how well tagged an album/song is, Plex gets it wrong or right seemingly at random. And even if it gets it right, there's hardly any real data attached. If you've done Picard, you know how much data is available. If you've done Tidal, you know how much info is available. Plex seemingly doesn't display much of anything. Its lucky to get the Album artist and Album title correct.

I will take a look at Roon. The problem being, I already have a solution that works in iTunes. Its just not going to have a future if Apple pulls the plug. So I feel like I need to move music management software. Plex and movies are a seemingly great match. It gets movies pretty well. That's why I started down the Plex path. Now that I'm trying music, ugh. Not so impressed.

 

[Spinningbull]

Thanks for the update. I am sitting here this morning struggling with Plex and tags. It doesn't seem to matter how well tagged an album/song is, Plex gets it wrong or right seemingly at random. And even if it gets it right, there's hardly any real data attached. If you've done Picard, you know how much data is available. If you've done Tidal, you know how much info is available. Plex seemingly doesn't display much of anything. Its lucky to get the Album artist and Album title correct.

I will take a look at Roon. The problem being, I already have a solution that works in iTunes. Its just not going to have a future if Apple pulls the plug. So I feel like I need to move music management software. Plex and movies are a seemingly great match. It gets movies pretty well. That's why I started down the Plex path. Now that I'm trying music, ugh. Not so impressed.

Roon is light and day better than itunes, especially if you care about audio quality. But, it's local network only. Still, worth a try.



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[Bucknekked]

Looks

Roon is light and day better than itunes, especially if you care about audio quality. But, it's local network only. Still, worth a try.



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Looks like I need to give Roon a try. I might as well try JRiver as well. I don't have my heart set on a particular tool. I just know what I want in the end : to be able to continue to play my music and enjoy it. Plex looks promising for movies for sure. And once the meta data is in Plex, it looks serviceable for music. One of the issues I just discovered with Plex is that just like iTunes, it does not imbed metadata in to the song files. It keeps a separate database. That means, just like with iTunes, its a do over on lots of metatags if something needs to get moved or done over. Sigh.

 

[Spinningbull]

Looks

Looks like I need to give Roon a try...

... just discovered with Plex is that just like iTunes, it does not imbed metadata in to the song files. It keeps a separate database. That means, just like with iTunes, its a do over on lots of metatags if something needs to get moved or done over. Sigh.

I have roon and plex servers running on the same PC in the rack. Would probably be pushing it for a nas CPU, so take that into consideration.

I tried jriver, but i didn't like the ui at all so didn't try very long.

The other thing you may want to look at is emby. Basically a direct competitor to plex, has some pluses and sone minuses. I found the setup more complicated, and not quite worth it for the benefits - but you may have a different experience. One thing emby does it sounds like you'd like is stores the download assets with the media - updates the files and copies cover art in the dir, which can then be picked up with other systems.

Roon can also be setup to edit the metadata directly in the media files as well as the database. Based on your experience with plex, I suspect that's what is happening in my setup. Roon pulls all the meta data down and updates the files, which plex then just uses.

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[Bucknekked]

I have roon and plex servers running on the same PC in the rack. Would probably be pushing it for a nas CPU, so take that into consideration.

I tried jriver, but i didn't like the ui at all so didn't try very long.

The other thing you may want to look at is emby. Basically a direct competitor to plex, has some pluses and sone minuses. I found the setup more complicated, and not quite worth it for the benefits - but you may have a different experience. One thing emby does it sounds like you'd like is stores the download assets with the media - updates the files and copies cover art in the dir, which can then be picked up with other systems.

Roon can also be setup to edit the metadata directly in the media files as well as the database. Based on your experience with plex, I suspect that's what is happening in my setup. Roon pulls all the meta data down and updates the files, which plex then just uses.

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I too didn't like the JRiver ui. I decided to finish my Plex migration even as painful as it has been.
I need to finish the task. Then I'm going to see if I'm "happy enough" with Plex to use it for my whole house management software. If I'm "happy enough" (that means my wife can use it and not gripe) I may leave it alone and just keep my all Apple setup in my music room where I do most of my critical listening.

I had no idea moving my library would be this messy. Holy cow.

 

[panteragstk]

Plex and music can be a bit of a pain, but I've found that if your id3 tags or whatever tags you use are good BEFORE you import into Plex then you'll probably not have issues. If you try to correct after the fact, then you may have some problems.

My collection is working well enough that I only randomly find issues, but I've been at it for close to a decade.

 

[Bucknekked]

Plex and music can be a bit of a pain, but I've found that if your id3 tags or whatever tags you use are good BEFORE you import into Plex then you'll probably not have issues. If you try to correct after the fact, then you may have some problems.

My collection is working well enough that I only randomly find issues, but I've been at it for close to a decade.

panteragstk
I wish I could say with some authority what the exact problem is. At first, I was convinced that Plex just couldn't read tags at all. Then I did a bunch of checking on my existing library and I came away pretty stunned. I totally re-ripped my library at the end of 2017 I think it was. I literally started my iTunes library over from CD and did all the artwork etc to have everything as pristine as possible.

Fast forward to this week and its been 2 years since that house cleaning and I have discovered 87 albums since that time that were not ripped from CD but purchased from Amazon and other music outlets. I have also discovered older music has crept in from my older libraries that was purchased from iTunes. So I have approximately 100 albums not ripped but purchased in some form.

That means the tags are of a mixed origin. What's really, really aggravating is that Plex has the biggest struggles with the albums I ripped from CD and tagged with iTunes. That's almost 400 albums. Some it seems to handle ok while others it struggles to get anything right. And those are the ones I ripped and tagged. The storebought ones it seems to just choke outright over Mpeg4 files. It doesn't want to recognize Mpeg4 files at all. And I have far, far too many AAC Protected files from the olden days of iTunes and DRM encoded stuff. I thought I had gotten rid of all that. Apparently not.

Amazon, or some source I bought music from, gave me mpeg4 files. iTunes seems to love them. Plex doesn't. That's one source of problem. AAC protected is another mess. That one is my own damn fault. I stopped a long time ago buying from iTunes/Apple over that. But these are files from 2007 and earlier. Wow that's a long time ago. Then there's the Plex just not liking tags from iTunes, sometimes and not clear why sometimes yes and why sometimes no.

Right now, I have about 400 albums hand entered in to Plex. One by one. They have album art. That's about it. But, they are in Plex and they play and for most things, that's ok. I still have about 100 albums I somehow have to fix/convert/alter to get Plex to accept them. I haven't started that pile of troubles yet. Wish me luck

 

[panteragstk]

panteragstk
I wish I could say with some authority what the exact problem is. At first, I was convinced that Plex just couldn't read tags at all. Then I did a bunch of checking on my existing library and I came away pretty stunned. I totally re-ripped my library at the end of 2017 I think it was. I literally started my iTunes library over from CD and did all the artwork etc to have everything as pristine as possible.

Fast forward to this week and its been 2 years since that house cleaning and I have discovered 87 albums since that time that were not ripped from CD but purchased from Amazon and other music outlets. I have also discovered older music has crept in from my older libraries that was purchased from iTunes. So I have approximately 100 albums not ripped but purchased in some form.

That means the tags are of a mixed origin. What's really, really aggravating is that Plex has the biggest struggles with the albums I ripped from CD and tagged with iTunes. That's almost 400 albums. Some it seems to handle ok while others it struggles to get anything right. And those are the ones I ripped and tagged. The storebought ones it seems to just choke outright over Mpeg4 files. It doesn't want to recognize Mpeg4 files at all. And I have far, far too many AAC Protected files from the olden days of iTunes and DRM encoded stuff. I thought I had gotten rid of all that. Apparently not.

Amazon, or some source I bought music from, gave me mpeg4 files. iTunes seems to love them. Plex doesn't. That's one source of problem. AAC protected is another mess. That one is my own damn fault. I stopped a long time ago buying from iTunes/Apple over that. But these are files from 2007 and earlier. Wow that's a long time ago. Then there's the Plex just not liking tags from iTunes, sometimes and not clear why sometimes yes and why sometimes no.

Right now, I have about 400 albums hand entered in to Plex. One by one. They have album art. That's about it. But, they are in Plex and they play and for most things, that's ok. I still have about 100 albums I somehow have to fix/convert/alter to get Plex to accept them. I haven't started that pile of troubles yet. Wish me luck

I've heard good things about dBpoweramp, but haven't used it in a long time.

I've used Mp3tag as well as Jaikoz which is basically a smart spreadsheet style tag editor that uses musicbrainz to identify songs. It also can edit just about any tag. I think it's just a "fancier" version of Picard.

All of my files are either .mp3 or .flac. I've never been in the Apple ecosystem at all so I don't know how their acc and whatever their losless format works as far as tagging.

Have you checked the embedded tag option in Plex?

 

[Bucknekked]

I've heard good things about dBpoweramp, but haven't used it in a long time.

I've used Mp3tag as well as Jaikoz which is basically a smart spreadsheet style tag editor that uses musicbrainz to identify songs. It also can edit just about any tag. I think it's just a "fancier" version of Picard.

All of my files are either .mp3 or .flac. I've never been in the Apple ecosystem at all so I don't know how their acc and whatever their losless format works as far as tagging.

Have you checked the embedded tag option in Plex?

View attachment 30460

It took me a few moments to find that selection: I wasn't using it ! I checked it and will go and try something now that selection is made. This may help . This is the first ray of hope in several days. Let's hope it works or does something positive.

 

[Bucknekked]

I've heard good things about dBpoweramp, but haven't used it in a long time.

I've used Mp3tag as well as Jaikoz which is basically a smart spreadsheet style tag editor that uses musicbrainz to identify songs. It also can edit just about any tag. I think it's just a "fancier" version of Picard.

All of my files are either .mp3 or .flac. I've never been in the Apple ecosystem at all so I don't know how their acc and whatever their losless format works as far as tagging.

Have you checked the embedded tag option in Plex?

View attachment 30460

I had such high hopes for that little option of including imbedded tags. Alas, it is of no affect.
Here's what I did. I went and chose an album with lots of available metatag data. Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon. I opened it in MusicBrainz Picard. I made sure there was new metatag data in the file and saved it with Picard. Checked to make sure there was new file creation date and timestamp from Picard. All is well so far.

I then went to the file structure that Plex is using and erased the album, made the database scan to make sure it was gone, and then re-added the version with all the new tag data. Nada. Zip. Plex couldn't identify the album artist or the album title. That just puts it in a big junk heap called unknown artist. If you do 10 albums it tosses all 10 in to the same heap intermingling the songs and who knows what else. And I know the tag data is there from Picard because I can view it and that's a pretty well known metatag app. And I'm not shooting for rocket science tags like session musicians who played on the album. I'm happy with just getting the album title and artist correct. Nope. It just seems to not want to do it.

Yet, on some albums done the same way, it does work. This lets me rule out iTunes as the culprit for the tags. Picard did the tags and Plex still didn't read them properly. I have no idea at this point and from reading Plex forums on this issue, nobody else has a good answer either. Lots of folks with the same issue, but, nothing coming from Plex on why or what the fix is.

I'm moving on now to "fixing" those MPEG4's and protected AAC files so they can be imported. Those I'm pretty sure are legitimate problem children.

 

[panteragstk]

I had such high hopes for that little option of including imbedded tags. Alas, it is of no affect.
Here's what I did. I went and chose an album with lots of available metatag data. Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon. I opened it in MusicBrainz Picard. I made sure there was new metatag data in the file and saved it with Picard. Checked to make sure there was new file creation date and timestamp from Picard. All is well so far.

I then went to the file structure that Plex is using and erased the album, made the database scan to make sure it was gone, and then re-added the version with all the new tag data. Nada. Zip. Plex couldn't identify the album artist or the album title. That just puts it in a big junk heap called unknown artist. If you do 10 albums it tosses all 10 in to the same heap intermingling the songs and who knows what else. And I know the tag data is there from Picard because I can view it and that's a pretty well known metatag app. And I'm not shooting for rocket science tags like session musicians who played on the album. I'm happy with just getting the album title and artist correct. Nope. It just seems to not want to do it.

Yet, on some albums done the same way, it does work. This lets me rule out iTunes as the culprit for the tags. Picard did the tags and Plex still didn't read them properly. I have no idea at this point and from reading Plex forums on this issue, nobody else has a good answer either. Lots of folks with the same issue, but, nothing coming from Plex on why or what the fix is.

I'm moving on now to "fixing" those MPEG4's and protected AAC files so they can be imported. Those I'm pretty sure are legitimate problem children.

One last question. What is your file naming convention?

 

[Bucknekked]

One last question. What is your file naming convention?

/MUSIC_FOR_PLEX/ARTIST NAME/ALBUM NAME/SONGS
example: /MUSIC_FOR_PLEX/Pink Floyd/The Dark Side of the Moon/Breathe
not in caps.........

 

[panteragstk]

/MUSIC_FOR_PLEX/ARTIST NAME/ALBUM NAME/SONGS
example: /MUSIC_FOR_PLEX/Pink Floyd/The Dark Side of the Moon/Breathe
not in caps.........

Folder is fine, but the songs need to be in the album directory, but named a specific way. Like this: Pink Floyd/The Dark Side of the Moon/Pink Floyd - The Dark Side Of The Moon - 01 - (a)Speak To Me (b)Breathe.flac

That file is weird so here's another example: Pink Floyd\The Dark Side Of The Moon\Pink Floyd - The Dark Side Of The Moon - 02 - On The Run.flac

So what is happening is Plex sees a song called Breathe and that's it. No artist, no album. ID3 should be working, but apparently not.

So, your new best friend is a program called FileBot. By default it tried to name my files Artist - Song.flac, but I like to have the album there too just in case there is a special edition or live album and plex won't get confused.

Filebot will also name things via ID3 tags as well.

Hope this works for you.

 

[Bucknekked]

wow. I have to run out for a few hours. I still have about 100 albums that need converting and then loading to Plex so I have some cannon fodder left to use. That sounds strange enough it just might work.
My chief worry at this point after having put 400 albums in is that if anything happens, anything at all, to an album or song, and plex needs to re-acquire that album(s), it won't know what to do and I'm back at square one.

If a folder/song naming convention fixes it, I'm up for that. Thanks .. will try it later on today

 

[Bucknekked]

So, your new best friend is a program called FileBot. By default it tried to name my files Artist - Song.flac, but I like to have the album there too just in case there is a special edition or live album and plex won't get confused.

The one good thing about aging (I officially became old last month when I got my medicare card) is the development of patience. I never had any back in the day. Time has taught me patience. And this conversion project to Plex for music (movies were a snap) has tested my patience. I think I have finally unlocked the sources of the problem on why its been so dang hard to get this to work. As usual, its more than one thing. Looking for a single cause was a lost cause. Its several things combining that make this such a mess.

With @panteragstk help and suggestions, I think I've got it figured out. I have tried a half dozen problem children and I can get them all to work. That tells me I'm pretty close. It still means a ton of work and conversions, but, at least I can have confidence in what I'm doing.

For those who are just arriving at this thread, I was trying to load my iTunes library for music in to a Plex library for music. Plex was shitting the bed all over the place. I couldn't figure out why. Panteragstk helped me figure it out.

If you care: here's the underlying problem(s).
1. Naming convention. Plex is VERY particular about song names. FIX: filebot batch renaming for music
2. Missing ID3 tags, Cover Art, Album artist etc. Some of this fixed by just the filename convention
3. MP4 files not recognized. I have 100's of these. This is the most perplexing. Some MP4s I could convert and make work. Others = nope. It turns out MP4's are containers. What's inside the container can vary considerably. the MP4 file extension doesn't tell you enough. You have to examine the file to see what's inside. Some of my MP4 files are AAC protected files. The evil DRM from Apple. Nothing seems to prevail against that. But the MP4 files I bought from Amazon did not give me troubles.
4. Plex and Apples AIFF file format are not best friends. Plex will play them OK. Plex will recognize them if they are on speaking terms. But, if Plex is feeling a little insecure or snubbed, it will not recognize the album artist or title or whatever else it doesn't want to do. No ryhme or reason to it. Another Apple'ism. Fixed with FLAC conversion. Also fixed manually by manually entering this information. The problem here is that if you need to reload the music, all the manual changes are gone and you get to do it over.

I think I can finish this conversion project off now. Things are finally making sense. I decided to move from iTunes to Plex because Apple is pulling away from iTunes. If they are, so am I. No good deed goes unpunished.

 

[Bucknekked]

Just a small update/victory. I have a fair amount of purchased music over the years. I much prefer to have the CD and rip it from there. But, sometimes I gave in to the immediate download. And even worse, sometimes those were DRM protected AAC files. That's a self inflicted wound. But, at the same time I had some functioning brain cells because I took those DRM protected purchases and spun them out to CD "just in case".

Now, all I have to do it re-rip them and I have DRM free, FLAC files and they are named properly and have nice ID3 tags. I guess it all works out in the end if somewhere along the line a CD is involved. I love it when a plan comes together. I had forgotten I had done that. I discovered it while searching through my CD's. I am smarter than I thought I was. Ha. that's funny.