After my recent Forum thread with @DTR , Different instances of the same music track have the same GUID , I suggest please that Plex should use more than just audio tracks’ Plex database track_guids to populate the Recently Played playlist, because the present arrangement can make the playlist inaccurate. Moreover, I propose that such additional accuracy should be utilised across the Plex db, wherever audio tracks are identified.
To summarise the problem behind my suggestion, I have Release “Common People” by Pulp - MusicBrainz in my Plex music library and recently played it, having previously manually matched it by MBID.
Afterwards, Recently Played incorrectly showed the first played track as being from Release “Hits” by Pulp - MusicBrainz (a release which is also in my library and is also manually matched by MBID):
By comparison, dashboard’s Play History successfully matched the first played track to the correct release, using my preferred local metadata:
Having looked at the affected track in my db’s metadata_items table , I found that four instances of it shared the same track_guid, track/5d07cddb403c640290f88804, despite the fact that they’re each taken from separate releases:
I infer from this that track/5d07cddb403c640290f88804 must be pointing at Recording “Common People” by Pulp - MusicBrainz, specifically numbers 1.1 and 1.5 in the problem case I’ve described. However, Plex’s Recently Played playlist appears to be insufficiently granular (constructed only from track_guids?) to report accurately the release from which each played track is taken, where more than one release containing the same track is present in the music library.
A possible solution to this could be for Recently Played to incorporate data already captured behind metadata_items’ parent_id field - which, in the example of the above screenshot at least, seems to distinguish between the four tracks. @DTR has highlighted to me that parent_id links track_guid with release_guid, as well as other germane deets (@DTR’s screenshot below, with thanks):
Alternatively, could Recently Played be modified to identify tracks with comparable accuracy to dashboard’s Play History? The missing ingredient at the moment appears to be album title (release_guid?).
If/when a solution is implemented, I propose it should be rolled out to cover all instances where audio tracks are identified in the db, since @DTR has noted that the issue I’ve experienced is part of a class of problems arising from Plex in places using single guids to identify items. I understand that comparable issues occur when ratings and/or watch statuses get synced between separate library items, for example, presumably because those items share a guid but aren’t contextually distinguished beyond it.
I would have thought that it should be possible accurately to distinguish library items across the Plex db, even in my user case of identical recordings being present on several releases/albums. I hope this problem can be fixed.
Thanks for considering.
