Both Flac and MP3 version of track

General Discussions
1

I have added my Music library to Plex which has both a Flac and 256kbps MP3 of all tracks, with both Flac and MP3 tagged. Premium music library, but I told it to use embedded tags where they exits.

The problem is that when scanned Plex shows each track twice. Now with videos you can have multiple versions of the same video. Am I missing something or is this a limitation of Plex? Ideally I would like Plex to see both and use the appropriate version depending on how I am accessing the file.

I have “fixed” the problem for now by setting an ACL on all the flac files so the Plex user cannot see them.

2

It is such little work for Plex to transcode audio like this, why don’t you just keep the FLAC files?

3

For two reasons, firstly Plex is not the only way to access the music. Secondly the server does not have the headroom necessary to be performing transcoding of the files even from Flac to MP3 as there is a whole extended family using it. Thirdly one has to think of the Bangladeshi’s :slight_smile: that is it is wasteful of power and hence also money to constantly reencode from Flac to MP3 when an MP3 version already exists. Fourthly I would like to add an ALAC version of all the files too, which would exacerbate the situation further.

Just seems really odd to me because the video end of Plex which is what Plex is first and foremost has handled this since forever.

4

Two folders seems the best option IMHO.