There were 3 other bundles in the same folder as the DVD order one (which I did remove). I don’t know what they are or if they are necessary still, but here’s their names and dates on the folders if that is even relevant. I’m pretty much in ‘spaghetti at the wall’ mode at this point.
Services.bundle Date modified: 7/26/2017 (yesterday seems relevant)
SiteConfigurations.bundle Date modified: 10/23/2014
WebManager.bundle Date modified: 11/27/2014
@cft76011 said:
All of these drives are local within the system running Plex Media Server, but across my LAN the M and V drives are duplicated as mapped network shares.
Them being local is good, but you should avoid sharing the plex data folder over the network. Just to avoid the possibility of ‘locking’ conflicts.
I also think you get a slight performance benefit if you separate media and metadata into separate drives, particularly when both are still ‘spinning rust’ 
All drives are NTFS
Good.
I do not running anti-virus software on my server computer as it is rarely if ever used to casually browse the Internet and not that I am by any means infallible, but I am in IT and typically know what to avoid.
Did you disable the default Windows Defender as well?
Like I always tell my clients, your #1 security vulnerability is your own user’s actions.
That is certainly true.
Do you want another log file once I perform those actions or do you have anything else you would like me to do?
No need, thanks.
There were 3 other bundles in the same folder as the DVD order one (which I did remove). I don’t know what they are or if they are necessary still, but here’s their names and dates on the folders if that is even relevant.
Services.bundle Date modified: 7/26/2017 (yesterday seems relevant)
SiteConfigurations.bundle Date modified: 10/23/2014
WebManager.bundle Date modified: 11/27/2014
No harm done if you remove these.
Some of them will get restored upon next Plex start, though.
@OttoKerner said:
Them being local is good, but you should avoid sharing the plex data folder over the network. Just to avoid the possibility of ‘locking’ conflicts.
I also think you get a slight performance benefit if you separate media and metadata into separate drives, particularly when both are still ‘spinning rust’
I don’t disagree and while I have literally never had to do this I have the old habit of trying to keep data off my system drive in case I need to reinstall Windows which is actually what my D drive is for. Now that you have kind of prodded me about that I may shift the Plex database over to my D drive since it is just another partition on the same physical drive as C. Is there a graceful way to do that or simply by changing the setting in PMS settings, shutting down the server, moving the files and restarting should be fine?
Did you disable the default Windows Defender as well?
I have not, but I can. I have little use for it really.
Edit: I underestimated myself. It was disabled.
No harm done if you remove these.
Some of them will get restored upon next Plex start, though.
Very good. I will remove them. Should I just sit tight for the time being until further instruction or am I just kinda screwed at this point? 
@cft76011 said:
Now that you have kind of prodded me about that I may shift the Plex database over to my D drive since it is just another partition on the same physical drive as C.
It wasn’t me, officer! 
Is there a graceful way to do that or simply by changing the setting in PMS settings, shutting down the server, moving the files and restarting should be fine?
Full procedure with extra precautions inserted:
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/comment/851746/#Comment_851746
Should I just sit tight for the time being until further instruction or am I just kinda screwed at this point?
Just try what comes out of the ‘preference reset’ I linked to above.
Moving the Plex data folder is not considered to change anything in regards of the initial issue.
So I’d postpone that.
I went through all of your steps (backing up all relevant drives beforehand) and nothing bad happened and I even got excited for a moment when my ‘Newest first’ sorting worked initially AND albums were in the proper order in that view particularly, but that’s not the view I prefer so I switched to ‘Oldest first’ and lo and behold it’s still screwed up! How does that work?!? Then I thought well at least now my sorts all seem to work where before they were kinda unpredictable, but as I switched from one to the other they started acting the same way they had before and even the ‘Newest first’ option which worked initially ceased functioning after I switched away from it and now does nothing when chosen. :s
Is there an area in Plex where the sort options are stored in a file that could be viewed / reset to defaults or is it just part of the database now? Or did I essentially reset any options associated with that when I followed your instructions?
Definitely not sure where to go from here. I have a backup now that is current so I could just wipe the whole thing out and start from zero just to see what happens? Or is there yet some other options between where we are now and that option that we could try?
I don’t know that this is an option or even desired, but I almost wish I could get you on my server in a view-only Google Hangouts session or similar option so you can see what’s happening because I feel like I’m struggling to adequately describe what’s happening in a text format without sounding horribly verbose or convoluted. Maybe I should take a video of it and post it on YouTube for reference that way if it might help?
I filed a new error report for that issue.
This is only tangentally related to your bug report, but I must have seen the same thing at some point, because in Plex, I’ve always just prepended the sort album field with the full date [1968/05/15], [1968/09/27] (or [1968, 01], [1968, 02] when the exact release date is unknown) and let it sort by release date or album title. If it falls back to the album title for albums released in the same year, the sort album field will take care of it.
@fecaleagle said:
This is only tangentally related to your bug report, but I must have seen the same thing at some point, because in Plex, I’ve always just prepended the sort album field with the full date [1968/05/15], [1968/09/27] (or [1968, 01], [1968, 02] when the exact release date is unknown) and let it sort by release date or album title. If it falls back to the album title for albums released in the same year, the sort album field will take care of it.
Well that is encouraging in the sense that my server is not an isolated incident because the resolution you cited would correct the sorting issue and while I applaud you for taking the initiative to figure out how to handle it yourself I would personally rather not have to go through and manually enter date information twice into two separate fields when the server should be able to take care of the sorting correctly and does a perfect job in the full library view Sort All → Albums → By Release Date
My personal thought is these are the changes that should be made at minimum:
The artist pages should use the same organizing scheme as the full music library’s ‘Sort All → Albums → By Release Date’ (ascending or descending) which shows the full release date and not just the year.
* i.e. 2017 would be 2017, 2017-08 would be Aug 2017, and 2017-08-02 would be Aug 2nd, 2017
That the ‘Originally Available’ field in the Album’s General Tab should be renamed to ‘Release Date’ in order to be consistent with the Sort Albums By Release Date option in the full library view.
The behavior of the current month and day being used along with the correct release year to fill in those areas in the ‘Originally Available’ field when albums get imported. Leaving the month and day blank (which is not currently allowed I just realized) would be preferable to having wrong information on every single album in my library. As I mentioned earlier in this thread I had this specific experience last month though this behavior has been going on for at least a couple of years.
When an album is added to Plex it grabs the correct release date year, but then fills in the rest of the ‘Originally Available’ field with the current month and day. For example, I added Train’s new album ‘a girl a bottle a boat’ on July 4th 2017 after having just seen their live show the night before and Plex set the release date to July 4th, 2017 and I had to look it up and manually change it to the correct date which was January 27th, 2017.
Edit: I have, in the past, typically never entered date and month values into the metadata of my music files. Only recently when I experienced sorting issues with artists that had multiple releases per year did I start even caring about that information and would only enter it into Plex manually which is how this all got started. If I enter the exact date into my files prior to dropping into my music folder that Plex is monitoring it does fill in with the correct info, but as already stated it does use current day and month if that information is not filled in and I’m not sure that’s the best way to go? That’s above my pay grade, but that corrects my issue with that and I acknowledge I can take the initiative to be more thorough so that the correct information will get relayed to the Plex library scanning agent. This, of course, still does nothing for the overall sorting issue which is the core concern of this thread.
I completely agree with you on all counts. For music, I only use Plex to supplement Spotify, so it is surely easier to manually specify a sort field when required in my library than it would be in yours. We always want our albums sorted by date, so that is the only sort mechanism I care about. I only alter the sort album field when two albums by an artist were released in the same year, and I only indicate this with [year, order] in the form [####, ##].
Again, this is probably sufficient for my wife and I because we only view albums by artist, and we only care about sorting by release date.
I whole-heartedly agree that all of the issues you’re reporting should be addressed, and doing so should be rather trivial, given that they’re just issues of consistency across views and honoring the given fields that are relevant when doing a sort by release date, but I can at least confirm that I saw the same sort behavior shortcoming the first time I had an artist with two albums in the same year and had included full release dates for those albums in an attempt to get Plex to sort them correctly.
My suggestion is a bit of a kludge that works passably if your requirements are as specific as mine are. I’ll pull my sort album fields for an artist tomorrow, specify the full release dates, and let you know whether the behavior I see is still consistent with what you’re reporting. I should note that my hard drive died on me last month, and my libraries were re-setup as new libraries with only the backed up media content. I don’t know how long ago your libraries were created, but my original ones were at least a few years old. The new ones originate with PMS 1.7.5; don’t know whether that should prove to be relevant.
I made the mistake of creating a Premium Music Library when I setup the server last month, and it appears I no longer have control over the artist view’s sort options. That said, when I switch to the all albums view and can excercise sort control, a more granular release date is leveraged correctly regardless of sort ascending or descending (without using sort album field), but in the artist view, the order appears to switch to ascending by title. Re-implementing the sort album field corrects it on the artist view once again.
I will delete the library and re-create it this weekend, since I intended to switch back to a standard library anyway.
I really haven’t messed with the full music library sort options / filtering until just recently and am pretty impressed with how robust it is so far. At any rate this allowed me to create a much better comparison of the problem I am experiencing.
In this first picture we see what I refer to as my ‘zen’ picture which shows the library filtering doing a perfect job of showing me all my KISS albums sorted by ascending release date.
This second picture, which is a little redundant since something extremely similar appears earlier in this thread, shows the KISS artist page sorted by Oldest first displaying albums out of order. The only difference I can see on the surface is the lack of accuracy in the release date under the album name. Here we only have the year, whereas above we have the full release day, month, and year being displayed and possibly being taken into account.
So today with the release of 1.9.0 I got hopeful when I saw this in the list of fixes.
So I installed it and held my breath and then let out a big sigh. No change.
I don’t know the details of #7349, but this unfortunately did not fix anything for me. The problem still persists even after creating a new library. I even tried to create both a new Premium and basic music library and the same problem occurred inside each. Month and day values are not being taken into account in the artist page when sorting by ‘Oldest first’ (a.k.a. Date Ascending). Library sort options also continue to not always do as they specify in addition to how individual artist sort settings interact with the global library setting.
@OttoKerner - can you shed any light on whether or not this particular fix was supposed to address the issues we went over in this thread or is it for something entirely different? The description certainly sounds like it would address this, but one never knows without the details. If there is a listing somewhere that shows the details of each fix number I’d be interested to know that in lieu of bothering you yet again.
The fixed bug deals with the case when you flip the sorting preference of a particular artist back to ‘library default’.
Previously, it would set an improper sorting mode and not what is defined in the library preferences.
Try flip that back and forth on an artist.
I have and that does not work correctly.
This was my first test: Basic library - default sort order set to ‘Oldest first’
Went into artist and changed to Newest first - nothing changed,
Left the artist and went back in to verify - still showing Oldest first.
Changed artist properties to sort by name - sort order changed successfully.
Changed artist properties to sort by Newest first - changed back to Oldest first
Changed artist properties to sort by name - sort order changed successfully.
Changed artist properties back to Library default - nothing changed (should have gone back to oldest first).
This was my second test: Premium library - default sort order set to ‘Oldest first’
Artist was initially set to sort by ‘Oldest first’ as it had habitually not been obeying the library sort order.
Changed artist properties to sort by ‘Library default’ - sort order changed to ‘by Name’ (which is incorrect).
Changed artist properties to sort by ‘Newest first’ - sort order changed to ‘Oldest first’
Changed artist properties to sort by ‘Library default’ - sort order changed to ‘by Name’ (incorrect again)
Changed artist properties to sort ‘by Name’ and nothing happened which is correct as that was the state it was in.
Changed artist properties to sort by ‘Oldest first’ - sort order changed successfully.
Changed artist properties to sort by ‘Library default’ - sort order changed to ‘by Name’ (incorrect).
My other artists that I have never changed off of library default always seem to follow the global library setting correctly as do new entries in my library, but if I ever change the setting once an artist entry has been created that’s when the behavior seems to go haywire as you switch an artist’s individual sort setting from one option to another.
I also double-checked and verified I am indeed running the new server version 1.9.0.4252.
@cft76011 said:
My other artists that I have never changed off of library default always seem to follow the global library setting correctly as do new entries in my library, but if I ever change the setting once an artist entry has been created that’s when the behavior seems to go haywire as you switch an artist’s individual sort setting from one option to another.
I don’t quite get that.
You are saying that new artists behave correctly
And then you are saying that artist don’t behave correctly after they have been created.
What do you mean exactly ? To me this means that new artists behave correctly and not correctly.
I can’t recreate the issue on my side.
Are you saying that it only manifests itself with artists, which are brand new?
No, when an artist is newly created they seem to always correctly take on the global library setting. However, if I go into any specific artist and then change its specific sort order to any other option away from ‘Library default’ I start getting aberrant behavior. Then once I’ve made this initial change as I alter the sort order around to different options I get the oddball results that I typed out in my previous post.
I am almost at the point where I give up.
When you change the sorting order for the whole library, are you waiting for the ‘spinner’ on your music library to stop, before you go into any particular artist?
I’ve found that it takes almost 5 minutes on my server after I change it. When you make any other edits within this time, they may conflict.
I have never changed the sort order for the whole library at any point since picking this back up on Sept. 11th. That is always set to Oldest first. I am only manipulating the sort order located when editing an Artist, then under Advanced.
Here is a quick and straightforward example of what is happening.
Music library is set to Oldest first and that’s where it stays, I go to the band Train, click the Edit icon, go to Advanced and change the sort order from Library Default (which is being being shown correctly at this point, listing the albums from earliest to newest) - but then I change it to Oldest first. Nothing happens as you would expect, but now if I go back in again to the same place and switch it back to Library default it sorts the albums alphabetically. This is incorrect of course and from this point on inconsistent behavior with this setting is now permanent for this specific artist. The only way to reset it is to move the artist folder out of my library until Plex removes it, then move it back.
I don’t see this behavior anymore. It was the faulty behavior of older versions, but not this one.
It will be a few days before I have time, but I will see if I can make a video and post it on YouTube to attempt to accurately show the behavior persisting on this new version because I don’t have any other way to prove it and we seem to have otherwise hit an impasse between you stating it is fixed and I’m saying it is not. And not that I need to be right or wrong which I am perfectly open to the latter, but I just don’t want you to think I am hallucinating this or just completely incompetent and if something does still need to be fixed then that will be a good thing to come to light.
In addition I will also download and install Plex Media Server on a different system with a different Plex account and will be creating a totally new database. It won’t be a PlexPass account or a premium library, but from the evidence I have so far that doesn’t seem to matter as the behavior persists in a standard music library. Diagnostically I hope this will offer some helpful insight into the problem truly being a problem or it possibly being that my database is corrupted or at fault in some way.
