[BUG] Multi-disc music rating copies across discs

[VarHyid]

If I have a 2 CD album and rate Song 1 on CD 1, the same rating will be copied to Song 1 on CD 2 and vice-versa.

Very annoying bug (on 1.20.5.3600), please fix as soon as possible.

Note, I’m using the embedded metadata for music (matching fails too often), my folder structure and naming are correct according to your guidelines although the guidelines don’t mention anything about multi-CD albums so if there is some extra rule there, please let me know.

Edit: I just noticed that it doesn’t actually always happen. It works fine for some discs, but not for others. Looks like it works if the album is matched, but some albums just don’t match correctly (especially for Various Artists) or I want to correct all the track names so please let me know how to handle this with unmatched music.

Edit 2: Matching doesn’t seem to help in some cases either. No idea what’s the source of this issue.

Edit 3: I think I might have figured it out (please confirm). If there is no match for the album, the track numbers in the file name must be 1-01, 1-02… 2-01 etc. and not just 01, 02 even if there’s (CD1) within the name of the album and “1” or “2” within the CD number tag and even though Plex correctly recognized them as separate CDs. If that’s true, it might be a good idea to add this information here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200265296-adding-music-media-from-folders/

[beckfield]

I’ve never seen the rating issue, and I can’t reproduce it with any of the multi-disc sets that I have. How are you rating the track? Are you doing it from the track list on the Album detail page, or are you opening the Edit Track screen and doing it from there?

It’s weird that it would happen on some and not others. That makes me think there’s an issue with your tags, or folder structure. They re-wrote the Plex Music agent last year to be much more accurate in dealing with embedded metadata (and it was a great improvement, eliminating some serious bugs), but the tradeoff is that it’s a lot pickier about the tags being exactly as it expects. Also, for reasons passing understanding, it actually became more dependent on the folder structure.

Would you mind posting some screenshots? Pick an album that is having this problem and take a screenshot showing the folder structure and filenames. Then a screenshot of your tagging application, showing at least these fields: Album Title, Track Title, Album Artist, Track Artist, Disc Number, Track Number.

You might also look through this How-To article and make sure Plex is fully configured to prefer embedded tags. It’s more than just the one checkbox.

• The disc number should never be included in the Track number field or the folder/file name. It’s more likely to cause problems than to resolve them.
• The Discnumber field must be populated, and only with the disc number itself (no “1 of 3” or “1/3.” “01” or “1” is a matter of personal preference. Plex has no problem with leading zeroes.

[VarHyid]

@beckfield

How are you rating the track? Are you doing it from the track list on the Album detail page, or are you opening the Edit Track screen and doing it from there?

I’m doing it from the album’s page so I click on the album to see all the tracks and play the album. As I do, I just click on the starts on the same page.

@beckfield

It’s weird that it would happen on some and not others. That makes me think there’s an issue with your tags, or folder structure.

My tags are definitely correct, I paid a lot of attention to that and it’s just like you say, the “Discnumber” is just a “1”, not “01” and not “1 of 3” or something, I made sure those are perfect. As I’ve mentioned in my edits, I think I found the pattern, it only happens if two conditions are met:

1. The album is not matched.
2. The track numbers don’t contain the CD number in the file name.

For example, I used to name the files like this:

Best of Something (CD1) - 01 - Song Title A
Best of Something (CD1) - 02 - Song Title B
Best of Something (CD2) - 01 - Song Title C

Now that I changed the file names of the affected albums to this:

Best of Something (CD1) - 1-01 - Song Title A
Best of Something (CD1) - 1-02 - Song Title B
Best of Something (CD2) - 2-01 - Song Title C

it works fine. That is, I did the “Plex dance” and now I can rate each track individually, the bug will no longer occur. Again, the tags in those files are unchanged and still OK, it’s just the track name data within the file name that makes a difference for some reason.

As for the folder structure, it’s like this:

Plex
| - Music
| - | - Madonna
| - | - | - Ray of Light

and all tracks are in the same album folder so I’m not using separate “CD1” or “CD2” folders inside. For compilations it looks like this:

Plex
| - Music
| - | - Various Artists
| - | - | - Best of Something

That said, as far as I’m concerned, I’m good now, but if it’s supposed to rely just on the tags then it seems like it doesn’t, at least when it comes to ratings because it does generally correctly notice them, that is - it splits the discs correctly.

[leelynds]

Maybe related, but the rating “bug” affects tracks in completely different albums. ex: a track in a Various Artists album that is also in an album by the track artist from the VA album

The bug is even cross-library. If you have that track in a different music library, it will inherit the rating from the other. Annoying…

[VarHyid]

Here are two screenshots for the devs, in case they can’t reproduce this or maybe there is really something wrong with my tagging (if so, let me know what).

This is an old German compilation CD called “Bravo Hits 26”. It contains 2 CDs and here’s how the file names, paths and tags look like in MP3Tag:

…and this is how it looks like in Plex (for Windows):

As you see, it correctly recognizes the 2 CDs, it recognizes the “Various Artists” album artist, it shows the correct individual artists for each track and right now it does in fact correctly allow me to rate each track on each CD just because I used 1-01, 1-02, 2-01 as the track number within the file name. If I changed it back to just 01, 02, 01, then the issue would return… unless it’s a known matched album such as all my a-ha CDs or the latest multi-CD albums from Metallica. Those are matched and always fine.