I have these too, and I’ve been sorting them as different albums since if they merged it would double up the album tracks, right? Or are we talking about a feature that would allow you to play a single version from one Album tile in the library? I don;t want a Mono album to play and then the stereo version to play after it. If I wanted that I could simply combine them myself using “Disc” numbering to split them. (Which is why I keep asking for a “NAME” field on the disc numbering so you could label Disc 1 Mono, Disc 2 Stereo etc.
TLDR - I would like to propose 2 settings that could be used in conjunction with each other. 1) A setting to automatically merge duplicate music albums with different bitrates/filetypes into a single album entry with songs listed once opposed to duplicated/triplicated and 2) The option to “Prefer playback of higher bitrate files when available” in Plexamp.
Many members (including myself) have duplicate albums as both MP3 and FLAC files. Today this shows up as a duplicate albums within Plexamp with no simple way to tell which is which from the album selection page. Merging albums results in songs essentially being doubled within the album and will play back both file types when playing a merged album. Being able to set a preference of playing back higher quality files when they exist and only listing and playing songs once instead of both versions would be really great.
I’d love the ability to swap between different bitrates of the same song on the fly in plexamp. Sometimes I have the same album but in different qualities.
As well as available in the Films and Series libraries, it would be super cool to have the possibility to filter items by similarities then we can cleanup duplicates ! 
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If you keep just a FLAC in your Plex library, Plexamp will stream it over cellular as a high-quality but low-bitrate Opus. Best of both worlds – you get the best available quality wherever you are, and no need to keep multiple encodings of the same album.
Roon and Navidrome use the VERSION tag to show different versions of the same album. You can decide what constitutes a version by setting the tag. These show up as additional info under the album name in Roon and Navidrome and make it easy to identify which version I want to listen to. It should be very simple for Plex to do the same.
I put in my VERSION tag the encoding (e.g. FLAC 16-44, DSD 256) and the publisher and catalogue number. I use Mp3tag to tag the files and apply my VERSION tag automatically using the file format and PUBLISHER and CATALOGNUMBER tags, but you could put anything in the VERSION.
VERSION is often also used to denote a different mastering (e.g. 30th anniversary edition) but I consider a different mastering to be a different album altogether, and put this in the album title in brackets, e.g. Random Access Memories (10th Anniversary Edition). Plex shows these as separate identifiable albums because the album title is different, which is what I wanted. While waiting for better Plex version support you could potentially also abuse the album title to differentiate versions (like FLAC vs. MP3, if you decided to keep your MP3 – but you’ll have better sound quality if you let Plex stream Opus to you instead). No matter what you choose, if you do it in a consistent way then a tagger like Mp3tag will be able to automate annotating the album title to include version info, and to move/remove the annotation later when Plex has better version support.
The one that frustrates me very much is not having support for multiple artists, which is very common, especially classical music, but also contemporary (Daft Punk feat. Pharrell Williams, for example). There does not seem to be any workaround, and it makes searching for albums/songs by artist very hard. Navidrome just added multi-artist support and Plex could follow their approach Navidrome Tagging Guidelines.
By the way, I no longer agree with 2018 Me. 
But I do wish we had support for multiple artists and a better system for those of us who keep multiple versions of an album (vinyl rip, CD release, deluxe edition, grandma’s zydeco remix edition, etc)…
But with Plexamp, there’s no need to have both mp3 and FLAC versions of the same release.
Someone already posted a screenshot of their Beatles music collection in the plex server, and I have the same problem with many artists. It recently came to my attention that the Roon software offers much better support for this issue. I also recently became a MusicBrainz picard user, and have started contributing to the community database. It seems to me that plex could solve this issue by better incorporating the MusicBrainz data into their album sorting methods. Every version of an album, EP, single, etc. get their own release tag in the MusicBrainz database as a unique identifier. I think plex should just use this.
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On the Plexamp home screen I have a “Recently Added in Music” section. Right now, if I own multiple versions of the same album (e.g original release, deluxe edition, remaster, anniversary edition, etc.), Plex treats them all as a single album. The add date that is used for sorting and for display in “Recently Added” is always the date of the very first version I added – even if I add a brand-new remaster years later.
Desired behaviour
When multiple versions of an album exist in the library, each version should appear as its own separate entry in “Recently Added in Music” (and any other date-sorted view), using the date that particular version was actually added or scanned into the library.
Example
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2018 → I add the original 1991 release of Nevermind
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2023 → I add the 30th Anniversary remaster → The 30th Anniversary edition should appear at the top of “Recently Added in Music” in 2023, not stay buried with the 2018 date.
This would make the home screen actually reflect real recent activity for collectors who gradually replace or supplement releases with newer/better versions.
Thanks!
