“Metadata Metadata, Where Art Thou Metadata?”

Organization Frustration

When you’ve produced and maintained as much music as I have, you start to come across the problem of organizing it and playing it back. Tracks pile up, you get various version of the same song, some live and others in a studio. Was “My Marie_V2_Live-(2).mp3” the one from L Street Tavern, or Flight? Its gets confusing awfully quick if you’re not careful. This is the problem I found myself facing back in 2016 when I first deployed my Plex server.

If you haven’t hear of Plex, its a cool piece of software you can run on a computer and it allows you to access your music (or TV shows, Movies, etc) from just about anywhere. I’m a huge fan-boy for self hosting my services, and I’ve been using Plex for the past several years to play my own collection of music I’ve accumulated. Most of the songs on there are things you’d have no trouble finding on Spotify. But some of it is a bit harder to come by. Fan recordings of Grateful Dead shows, iTunes exclusive songs, and songs that were written and produced by and for my friends that aren’t publicly available.

The great thing about all of this is that I can mark and label those songs in ways that make playback almost as easy as Spotify or Apple Music. Plex allows EPs and Live albums to have their own places in your library, separating them from longer and more developed studio albums, or singles.

How’s it do this? Metadata.

What is “Metadata”?

“Metadata is actually the building blocks of music algorithms...”

Metadata is the data about data. For music files, it’s the information in the file that tells the music player what the artist, album, and release date are for the song you’re listen to. Things like the producer and instrumentalists’ name(s), featured artists, mix engineer, and so much more can be tacked on to a specific song file. By filling in the metadata fields of a song, you can tell your music player more about what you’re listening to, and it can organize songs and playlists accordingly.

Plex actually does this, for the most part (more on this later). It will put all the songs by a specific “Artist” in the same spot so they’re easy to find. You can add things like “genre” and “mood” to specific songs and Plex will automatically create playlists for you. Metadata is actually the fundamental building blocks of music algorithms that run Spotify and Apple Music.

One of the benefits of using something like Plex is that it organizes your library based on the metadata embedded in the file. But what about if the files doesn’t have any metadata embedded in it? Plex will actually auto populate that data for you! Nothing is more magic then when you have a disorganized mess of files and Plex still manages to putt data on everything and sort things correctly. But where does it get the data from?

MusicBrainz

Out in the wilds of the internet, on the fringes of nerd society, where music geeks and tech bros meet, you can find an ocean of music metadata. This ocean is vast, and contains information about almost every song you can think of; live albums and revoked releases, alternative masters of your favorite songs, and even that one song John Mayer recorded with Herbie Hancock and never promoted.

These wonderful folks have built a massive database about what song was released where and on what platforms with whatever engineer and on and on. Live albums are separated from EPs are separated from singles and so on. And what’s amazing is Plex can import all of this. Actually, the data that Plex imports is usually more useful then the data that’s in the file.

Remember when I said Plex does a great job “for the most part” using the data in the file? Well, there are limitations to this. Plex can’t use the data in the file to tell if a song is from an EP or an Album, or if an album is a “live” album vs a regular “studio” album. This type of data isn’t stored in the file just because of limitations of how mp3, flac, and other audio files are organized. But MusicBrainz does have this data, and Plex can pull it into your library.

All we have to do is get the data into MusicBrainz then? Well, yeah.

Here’s the thing I’ve been working on recently. I’ve been trying to add metadata about my own music into MusicBrainz. This means that if anyone were to pull my music into their own Plex servers, they would find all the tracks automatically landing in a nice and organized way, right into Plex (or whatever they’re using).

If you’re a super-duper nerd about this stuff, and you want to track me down on MusicBrainz, you can find my username, nixpardus135.