Dashboard reporting play history tracks from different albums to what was actually played

[anon5074910]

Server Version#: Version 1.27.2.5929
Player Version#: Version 4.85.1

A little complicated to explain so bear with me.

To help explain lets use Kate Bush and the albums The Whole Story and Hounds of Love. We all know the same tracks can appear in different albums. Well, these two albums share three songs which appear on both albums Cloudbusting, Hounds of Love and Running Up That Hill.

So lets now play the entire The Whole Story album. Afterwards, review the web dashboard history and you will see something like this…

Okay, nothing strange so far, you can see its reporting Kate Bush - The Whole Story and then each track one by one. However, now lets pop over to the Plex Dash app and see what its reporting …

Notice, the album art ? Its artwork from multiple albums. Its actually reporting that those three songs above where played from the Hounds of Love album. Go back to the web dashboard and filter on that album …

You can see the filter is for Kate Bush · Hounds of Love but the title for all three songs shows it from Kate Bush · The Whole Story.

I checked the xml for one of the tracks Cloudbusting across both albums and I can see that mbid for both albums is different (expected) however they share the exact same plex id, plex://track/5d07cdbe403c640290f5d5fe.

So my question… is this a bug with the back-end metadata for the tracks or is it done intentionally ?

[anon5074910]

Does anyone from plex or a ninja have an opinion on this? Is there something I’ve done wrong tagging my music files which is causing this?

The more I start playing the more duplication and oddness is getting reported in dashboard stats.

[OttoKerner]

When a track is played, only its numerical track ID is stored. The same track ID can occur in several albums.
When a list of played tracks is compiled, Plex simply uses the album information of the first occurrence of the same track ID in the database. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the album from which you have actually played this track.

[anon5074910]

Okay, thanks. That at least confirms what I’m seeing and also confirms in not tagging my files incorrectly.

Seems like a bad design or oversight and something that could (should) be improved. Would be easy enough to add the album id when the track is played to the entry in the metadata_item_views table and then ensure the dashboard uses it.

Edit: I’ll create a feature request to have this added when I get some time later today. Thanks for the confirmation.

[anon5074910]

For what its worth I created a feature request for this specific issue → Feature Request: Have Plex Store Album ID for a played track. Feel free to add/adjust as you see fit.