And the bug was being discussed in the forums and Reddit before it was pushed to public.
I almost wonder if it was known but something else important needed to be distributed.
I dunno. Seems obvious from this side, but I’m inclined to assume positive intent.
What’s your bet the next version has changed dates more consistently? My biggest curiosity is why there isn’t a new beta yet.
If this bug is affecting you in a significant way, downgrading Plex is easy and a perfectly reasonable option.
Plex puts a bunch of work into making that possible. A given version of PMS will typically be forward compatible with an astonishingly large range of clients. Plex Media Servers advertise their capabilities, clients work with the capabilities available. Only really ancient clients don’t work at all (or platforms that have been abandoned by their vendors).
Plex also does very sophisticated bidirectional database migration. It’s absolutely possible to roll back to a previous version because the database schema and data can be migrated backwards.
They deserve real credit for how smoothly this works 99.99%+ of the time. Bidirectional database migration is a luxury and a competency many production environments don’t achieve - and Plex is doing it invisibly.
No doubt, but my point is that downgrading one component does not make sense for an environment that depends on multiple services. I am glad that it works, but it should be reserved for temporary corrections. I should add that temporary corrections, or band-aid solutions, lead to long-term commitments in many cases.
I am glad that downgrading works and there is bi-directional migration support. Let’s see if the Plex developers, who failed to perform basic data entry checks before rolling out a new Production version, can keep up with that level of support. Let’s hope no situation arises where administrators continue to use older software versions, waiting for a proper release. Keep in mind, the Plex Clients must support the running Plex Media Server version properly. Plex is no longer a simple media server; complex features release quarterly.
If downgrading is the best user solution, I would equate the advice to playing with fire. If the Plex developers support downgrading as a reflexive response to data-related bugs, they are encouraging the act of playing with fire.
I’m not trying to sell you anything. Edit dates or don’t edit dates. Wait for a fix, or roll back temporarily, or roll back and never update again. Update metadata.year manually in the database. Stop using Plex forever. To each their own.
Whatever happened was obviously a dumb bug. If anything I’m surprised there haven’t been more complaints.
No worries, I understand where you are coming from. I appreciate that your responses are genuine. The difficulties I face when attempting to side with Plex stems from multiple data loss events within my environment. I just get a feeling that my data is viewed as irrelevant to Plex.
Third-party metadata services should resolve my complaints entirely. The problem is that they have to work as well or better than I do. Right now, working with those services just adds more overhead and introduces new conflicts, such as community actions and policies.
That’s probably why more people aren’t complaining - I assume most Plex admins have never manually edited a single date.
And Plex has that usage data, so maybe they’re right not to panic about the bug.
Has this bug been acknowledged yet? It seems important to me, especially since it’s happening on 1.26.1.5772.
Not sure - but what I can tell you is change the date to 2013-01-02 it fixes it and shows 2013 vs 2012… Maybe it has something to do with timezones? I’m in Central time (gmt -5)
To me its not all that big a deal - its annoying, etc. but its not like something I would rollback over or go out of my way to edit 100 or 1000 albums to correct…
I prob only noticed it because of the other stuff on movies and tv shows having issues with dates, and other users mentioning music as well… I just recently added a few albums, and just did the mp3 tags on them directly… So this was easy to spot…
I do hope it gets corrected in the next release…
My music collection doesn’t work well with the general meta data sources plex uses… It would horrible mislabel some of my box sets - so I bit the bullet way back when and went through my complete library double checking all my tags were how I wanted them and making sure plex only used local resources for my music. And then reloading everything into the library… 1100 some albums…
I think that’s exactly what’s happening. I assume that when Plex extracts the year from originally_available_at it’s applying an additional unnecessary timezone shift, different from what’s used when displaying Originally Available in the UI.
You might not take action, sure.
I do not feel the same way. Plexamp has a feature that highlights release anniversaries to encourage meaningful engagement. I find listening to an album on its anniversary fun. Keeping track of anniversaries myself or through a solution outside of Plex is not fun.
The number of users downplaying metadata is wild. Once again, Plex is not a simple media player anymore. More complex features will fail to function as expected when the metadata bugs out. We can dismiss features such as the anniversary badge, but Plex would struggle to compete without them.
I don’t mean to downplay it for others. Sorry if I came across that way.
It isn’t annoying me very much, and I’m comfortable updating the database manually anyway.
I’m trying to assume positive intent from Plex, and it’s fun to hypothesize about how bugs happen.
I understand how little things can be very frustrating. This just doesn’t happen to be one that’s getting under my skin. Other things do drive me nuts.
Point taken.
@Volts - No need to apologize. I was responding to a statement @mrjohnpoz made, and to the initial reactions that I read from other posts. What I find most frustrating is how naturally the “no big deal” reaction is expressed. So many functions of Plex remain under the hood. It is easy to forget or never know how poor metadata can break the software. When users join together and claim “no harm no foul”, the Plex Staff will remain without a sense of urgency. In this situation, I think opinions can have real implications rather than act as a harmless form of expression.
Your time zone shift theory seems plausible and it was interesting to read. Discussing bugs is totally necessary and you bring up excellent points!
@mrjohnpoz made an excellent point too. I do not agree with editing local file metadata as it can cause a variety of problems and put historical data at risk. However, it would be great to completely disable the Plex metadata agents. At the very least, it would allow me to leave Plex more easily when a reasonable opportunity arrives. I would just have to swallow my investments and sigh. I would honestly rather not leave.
Plex does a fine job for the meta info for tv shows and movies, etc.
But I just had a huge issue with my music… lets say 90% of the time it would get it right. But it was just HORRIBLE at doing box sets… The one that broke it for me was 30 Trips Around the Sun a 80 CD box set… It was just horrible… So that was when I said not going to mess with this any more, and switched music to local only and use my own local tags.
For me music is secondary to video media. And while I like to think I have a large collection of music… It doesn’t compare to my video - I mostly had everything tagged correctly anyway, so it wasn’t all that hard to just double check and reload the library only doing local tags for music
While I agree it is annoying as hell… I will give them a few updates to get it fixed, before I go about messing with fixing it myself… What I don’t want to do is spend time correcting it, just to have them correct their issue and have to do it again, etc. 
Just chiming in as another user with the 1969-12-31 bug. I tried editing the video’s tags manually and refreshing metadata but to no avail.
Also chiming in on this bug. I’ve been experiencing it for at least a month, as described by OP.
Update to PMS 1.26.1
I have that boxset. I’m not sure how you wanted it displayed, but I was able to edit the metadata to break it up so that each concert was placed chronologically by year with the rest of my dead. I do it like this for all the live sets like Europe '72, etc.
I’m not sure if there’s private messaging on here, but I’d be happy to show you how I did it if this was your goal. That said, it can still be fiddly.
I wanted it displayed how your showing it - and works fine with just local meta data..
That was just an example of the straw that broke my camels back when it came to letting plex do meta data for my music. And frustrating when your music files had what you wanted for local tags anyway.. But thanks for the offer, but I am all good.. 1100 some albums all with the exact meta info I want displayed.. Other than this current issue with date and using the wrong year.
Glad you got it working.
I’m using the plex matching along with prefering local metadata and boy is it a lot of extra work to prep the files to get them to match and not group together and what not.
I had always been good about proper tagging with my music. But I did have some clean up to do, but it was minor stuff really… One of the things that bugged me was if the album artist didn’t exactly match the artist then it would be displayed next to the song title… Say grateful dead vs the grateful dead
