Android Plexamp - Album Playlist Track Order is not in Album Order

Plex Labs
1

Server Version#: 4.34.4
Player Version#: 3.2.2 Plexamp Android

Hi there, I am bringing this issue over from my Play Store review where the reply was to seek more help here.

My issue is when I use Plexamp to play an album, after I click the “Play” button in the album info screen, Plexamp loads the album into the playlist but then the order of the tracks in the playlist are not in the order they are found in the album - nor the order they were displayed in on the album info page.

I played around this morning as I found my MP3 folder for a problematic album had some duplicate MP3 files in it. I moved the duplicate files out of the album folder on disk. Then I found that Plexamp would indicate that I still had the entire album, which is correct, but it didn’t know the ID3 info for the songs that I had moved away from the album folder. So I guess I moved files that Plex Media Server was using to provide Plexamp the ID3 info with?

Even ignoring all that… Plexamp is still not loading the album songs in album order for me.

I’ve noticed it only does this for some albums and not others. So I’ll be monitoring problematic album’s folder contents on the physical disk now to see if I can find some pattern or reason for the problem there.

2

Hi @beardeddonkey,

When you moved the files out of the problematic album, did you get your Plex server to rescan the album before trying again in Plexamp?

Next time you see the issue, could you grab some debug logs from the app for us to take a quick look over? (Settings tab > Advanced > Debugging > Share Logs). Providing that will help figure out what’s going wrong :slight_smile:

3

Ok, so since I think this problem might be tricky I am going to give you all the detail I can from an album it does this with. I have 3 Doors Down / The Better Life, and I have a bonus disc that came with that album which is stored in a seperate folder called The Better Life (CD2) Here’s the file structure on disk, and then what Plexamp shows me on the 3 Doors Down / The Better Life album screen, and then what Plexamp loads as the playlist when I press the Play button on the album screen:

Files on Disc Order:

3 Doors Down / The Better Life
01 Kryptonite
02 Loser
03 Duck and Run
04 Not Enough
05 Be Like That
06 Life of My Own
07 Better Life
08 Down Poison
09 By My Side (1) (Duplicate file)
09 By My Side
10 Smack
11 So I Need You (1) (Duplicate file)
11 So I Need You

3 Doors Down / The Better Life (CD2)
01 Loser (Album Version)
02 Kryptonite (Acoustic Version)
03 Wasted Me (Non Album Track)
04 By My Side (Live)
05 So I Need You (Live)

The above files are in 2 seperate folders:
Music/3 Doors Down/The Better Life
and
Music/3 Doors Down/The Better Life (CD2)

In Plexamp, on the 3 Doors Down / The Better Life album screen, the alum is listed as:

Disc 1
01 Kryptonite
02 Loser
02 Loser [from the CD2 folder - play time is 2 seconds shorter than album file]
03 Duck and Run
04 Not Enough
05 Be Like That
06 Life of My Own
07 Better Life
08 Down Poison
09 By My Side [unsure which file this reflects as play times ar the same]
10 Smack
11 So I Need You [unsure which file this reflects as play times ar the same]

Disc Undefined
02 Kryptonite (Acoustic Version)
03 Wasted Me (Non Album Track)
04 By My Side (Live)
05 So I Need You (Live)
09 By My Side [unsure which file this reflects as play times ar the same]
11 So I Need You [unsure which file this reflects as play times ar the same]

When I press the “Play” button on the album screen the play list becomes:

01 Kryptonite (Acoustic Version)
02 Wasted Me (Non Track Album)
03 By My Side (Live)
04 So I Need You (Live)
05 By My Side
06 So I Need You
07 Kryptonite
08 Loser
09 Loser
10 Duck and Run
11 Not Enough
12 Be Like That
13 Life of My Own
14 The Better Life
15 Down Poison
16 By My Side

I exported the Plexamp logs like you asked. There are 6 log files. Do you need all of them? They are named Plexamp.1.log through to Plexamp.5.log and there’s also Plexamp.log

Plexamp.log is the youngest file.

Do you want me to cut and paste to here or a pastebin site? Or can I attach the entire zip here somehow?

Edit: Plexamp on Windows is producing the same album screen track listing and the same playlist.

I forced a rescan through the PMS web interface this afternoon, and the tracks in the other album I was testing with before didn’t change in the Plexamp listings. Some of the files weren’t showing any ID3 data in plexamp so I wrote that off for now and started fresh with The Better Life as the working example. But the answer is - no. a library rescan didn’t help the situation at all.

Here is a link to the Plexamp.log file: https://pastebin.com/avnHJmwt

4

In general, the playback order is defined by the server, not by Plexamp. In this case, it seems like the disc number isn’t properly set, I would go into the Plex Web app, select those tracks, edit them, and set it to e.g. disc 2. That will ensure they sort after disc 1.

5

Ok, this works the best. It fixes the problems with the playlist being out of order, and it also defines additional discs properly.

So I guess now, my question is, what is the best filesystem layout to use to deal with multi-disc sets? I’ve seen file naming conventions like 101 … 115 and then second disc is 201 … 205 for example. Does plex support this convention? This page: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200265296-adding-music-media-from-folders/ doesn’t really talk about multi disc sets.

Additionally, I think Plex (either the server or the clients) should be smart enough to notice duplicate tracks in the filesystem and when you click to play an album, the playlist should merge any duplicate tracks to only play one of them. I don’t know why I have duplicates and they seem somewhat random. I used to use Google Play Music, which has been deprecated this year, but I think the duplicates were generated from a backup/restore process from GPM. It would be nice if Plex could just ignore/merge dupes, or even better - notify me about them so I can tell it what to do about them, as I’d most likely just tell it to remove the duplicate tracks.

Thanks for the help. I will be trawling through my music collection in PMS now looking for things to fix.

Edit: also I’m kind of in a quandary over what to do with the previous album where I deleted the duplicate track files from the filesystem. PMS now sees those tracks in the album as having blank names. The album was 3 Doors Down / Away From the Sun. PMS is currently listing it as:

01
03
04
06
10
11
02 Away From the Sun
05 Running Out of Days
07 I Feel you
08 Dangerous Game
09 Changes
12 This Time

I did a forced library scan but it doesn’t re-get the ID3/meta data. Any tips to make it automatically get this data or is a manually type it in scenario? Kind of hoping I don’t have to do everything manually to fix up any duplicate files I find as it would be a lot easier to remove files via the filesystem and get all the metadata to automatically re-enter.

6

Generally it’s best if you set the disk number tags in the embedded metadata for the tracks. You can also name files like:

1-01 - xxx.mp3
a01 - xxx.mp3

plex operates on a folder-per-album structure, so if you have duplicate tracks inside a folder i’m afraid you’re going to have to get rid of those on your own.

the deleted tracks? those will vanish once you do a full scan of the library (not a refresh).

7

why not just delete them in the web app, which is the best place for “management” of the media?

8

Deleting via the filesystem is going to be a fair bit easier to first find duplicates, and then remove them.

I think the most automated approach will be to remove any duplicates from the filesystem using the filesystem, then I can move the culprit albums on the filesystem to a temporary directory. Let PMS notice they are not there any more, it will remove the album from the PMS database. Then move the culprit albums back into place on the filesystem, via the filesystem. Let PMS notice they are there again and it will rescan their metadata and build the album tracks properly again.

I just tried this with the Away From the Sun album and it worked well, so that’s the solution I’m going with.

I thought PMS might’ve been able to compare an album on filesystem against a track listing from an online database and realize if there were additional tracks and handle such a situation, but itf its just taking for granted what’s in the album folder on filesystem, I guess it means the onus is on the user to ensure the filesystem is correct.

9

Ah sure, fair enough. A Scan Library Files operation will remove deleted files.

10

Found an even better solution for anyone that wants to powerfully maintain their music collection. Look up software called AudioRanger. I paid the $35AUD for pro version, and it pretty much automatically identifies all the music in my collection (about 7000 files) tags it all, gets album artwork etc. then after some configuration to my liking, renames all the filenames into formats I like, moves them into folder structures I like/work with Plex. Identifies duplicates, sorts them into a folder for me to moderate, identifies “floater” songs, usually singles that I don’t have the album for and sorts into a folder. Absolutely amazing software. Worth every cent and highly recommend it.

1 Like
11

For tagging and file renaming, I (and many others here) use MusicBrainz Picard. Beets is also a popular alternative.

Both are free (and open source), and use the same music metadata source (MusicBrainz) that both Plex and AudioRanger use.

1 Like
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