Differently tagged albums in differently named folders show as multiple instance of the same album

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#: 1.19.5.3035
Player Version#: N/A
Server OS: Ubuntu

Plex Media Server Logs_2020-07-11_09-51-26.zip (6.6 MB)

Possibly unrelated to what follows: My server has been giving me “Something went wrong” when refreshing metadata on some albums. Does not appear to be a pattern to that.

What there is a pattern to is that suddenly, for one artist I have with 600+ albums (live recordings), tracks with different album tags in differently named folders will show as separate instances of the same album. I have the library set to prefer local metadata because most of the albums are not in an external metadata source’s records. The common element seems to be that the folder suffixes and album tag suffixes for things that duplicate like this are the same. This is due to the albums being part of a set. For example:

“93-03-27 - Knickerbocker Arena - Albany, NY - 30 Trips Around the Sun” is a folder name and is the album tag for tracks in that folder, and there is another folder named “92-03-20 - Copps Coliseum - Hamilton, Ontario - 30 Trips Around the Sun” with tracks which have album tags that are the same as that parent folder, but whichever one has metadata scanned last becomes the one that provides the album name in the library for both albums. In fact, with this being a 30 album box set, MOST (but not all) of those 30 albums seem to be titled with whichever one had its metadata scanned last. If I scan metadata for the entire artist, I can see these albums flip around as a group, following whichever was the last scanned. This happens on multiple, but not all box sets.

I’ve tried database maintenance, cleaning bundles, etc. None of these albums are merged. I have verified all tags are correct. The only thing I was able to do in one instance was to re-name and re-tag the track numbers on one album where they did not follow my normal convention, and although I did not touch the album tag, this seemed to break the unwanted linkage for that album. This is an interesting clue, but not a real solution as the tags and filenames for most of my collection are what I want them to be.

Anyway, please let me know what I can do. Logs are attached. Thanks for any help!

Edit: Just wanted to point out that it was not always this way. The “Something went wrong” errors have been going on for maybe a few weeks. I just recently noticed this duplicate album issue, possibly since I updated to the version noted. Not sure.

2

Make sure the meta tags for ‘Album Title’ have different content between the files in the two different folders.
You can try Split https://support.plex.tv/articles/201018248-merge-or-split-items/

3

Thanks for the suggestion. The album tags are different between the folders:

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Because the albums already appear as separate items in the library, I don’t know how to split them. when both selected, the option is still to merge, so in a sense they are not combined:

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Edit: For completeness, these are the files in the two items I show selected in my library screenshot, which correspond with the files in the tagging tool shown above:

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I suppose I could lock the titles and so on in Plex, but that is a pain and a workaround…

4

Drag the line ‘Local Media Assets’ all the way to the top under
Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - Personal Media
and
Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - last.fm

What is set as Agent and Scanner in the properties of your library, on the ‘Advanced’ tab?

5

Things appear to be set that way already:
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These are the agent and scanner settings for the library:
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6

Turns out that even trying to refresh each “linked” album individually and lock in its album and sort names does not work. They all just revert back to the most recently refreshed album with the locks back off.

7

I have had this happen before.

The only way I have found to ‘split’ albums/tracks that somehow got ‘merged’ together, is by going into each track and editing the correct album/artist/track info.

Once they are split, they will usually stay split.

Folder view will make this easier to update all the tracks at the same time.

Plex Web > music > select folders from the drop down

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navigate to the album path with the wrong metadata

(this is just an example album, not one I had a problem with)

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on the right side, check the first track
then on the last track SHIFT select the last track

you should then have all the album tracks selected together (or you can click individual specific tracks if you wish)

click the pencil icon to edit the group

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now you can correct the album artist/album/disc#/etc as needed.

some fields you change will show the ‘lock’ enabled. I would leave the lock there until you have made all your corrections and saved the update, and confirmed that your albums show correctly in the artist view.

Later, if you want, you can go back and remove the locks, in case you feel you want plex to be able to update/refresh them if needed.

Or you can just leave the locks in place, so they won’t be modified.

do note, if you need to edit the track titles or track artists (like for a compilation), you will have to edit each track individually

8

Thanks for the detailed instructions. I tries this with one, and it seemed to work. If there is no systemic solution offered up I will mark your instructions as the answer, but dang I have a lot of these to do and it means manually editing Plex information that should just flow from the properly tagged files, browsing out for art, re-doing dates, etc.

Anyway, I appreciate the workaround, which at least will get me back to some semblance of normalcy!

9

yes, it sucks. I hope for a plex fix, but I think it is unlikely due to the way they have integrated musicbrainz matching.

plex tries to match everything musicbrainz, whether or not musicbrainz actually has it or not.

and stuff like live albums/bootlegs, etc often get bad matching data attached to them, making them difficult to get separated out.

Just assuming here, that those 2 albums have some of the same matching ids for the tracks, so the plex scanner assumed they were the same album and merged them.

The most common scenario I come across is when you have multiple different releases of the same album;

  • original release
  • remaster release
  • collectors edition
  • box set edition
  • etc

a lot of times, plex will merge them all into whatever single release.

10

It’s gotta be something like that. I think I have things set up to look at and prefer local metadata, but the setting must not completely preclude the idea of what you are saying.

11

unfortunately there is no way to disable the matching

plex will forever try to match unmatched content

any random internet downloads, or bootlegs, or just a folder with your favorite files in it, that will never be a musicbrainz release, plex will always try to keep matching.

there is no way to turn off the matching, other than to switch off the new ‘plex music’ scanner/agent.

for example see @ Imported music tagged as Various artists

12

The fact that the agent is still set to ‘last.fm’ tells us that the OP doesn’t have an issue with musicbrainz.

The program code for the last.fm agent is not maintained anymore. There won’t be any further developments or bugfixes.

Try if you fare better when you actually use the new program code.
See this thread where I recommend to set up a test library and point it to the same files. You could do the same and watch the outcome: Music Scanner scrambles and omits tracks on Multi-CD sets

13

Thanks for the additional suggestions. I will try these and post back.

14

@OttoKerner I made a library pointing just to the one artist and set both agent and scanner to Plex Music, and chose to prefer local metadata. This seemed to resolve my issue. Assuming this is my solution, can I change scanner and agent in the existing music library or should I start fresh (losing some data on usage in the process)?

Of course, reading through the thread you linked to raises another question in my mind. There was reference that a date in the format YYYY-MM-DD can be specified, I think in the Year tag, and that this will carry through to the associated date in Plex. This has been some tedium I’ve been going through for a while where I have specified only the year in the Year field and then have to go in and update in Plex to have the correct month and day. Because of how I name folders, it would be fairly trivial to update the Year tag in my files to have the full date.

Before I do that, is this correct? Are all files (or at least MP3 and FLAC) supported for this?

Many thanks!

15

Converting a library is of course desirable.
However, there is a pitfall with sampler albums. If you can avoid this (as explained in the linked thread), then you should be good to go with a conversion.

Release date is working for me both in mp3 and flac.

16

Yikes, so one undesirable side effect of the transition from my previous agent and scanner choices, which I understand are deprecated, to Plex Music is that Plex is now using external sources of metadata again and has wreaked a bit of havoc on my library. Disc numbers all over the place, which are a throwback to an era I don’t live in anymore. Many titles matched to incorrect releases. Some titles incorrectly combined. With as many titles as I have, the work of manually fixing and locking the correct choices is unworkable, and from what I understand, locks associated with unmatched titles probably won’t stick anyway.

Is there a way, using non-deprecated scanners and agents, to have a library that is EXCLUSIVELY pulling data from the files’ metadata tags?

I know I am probably getting myself turned around on the options here, but it feels like I want something simple and each option available gives some but not all of the desired result.

Edit: I expect some of the advice will be to properly organize and name my media. While I am generally on board and have done this, I am a bit mystified at how all the unreleased live recordings I have are being matched up with something. On a whole other level, a lot of what I have are big box sets spanning multiple shows across many years. I don’t want each set to be a big monolithic set, I want each show to be a separate instance in chronological context with the rest of what I have. In short, there are instances where I intentionally and justifiably don’t want to follow what may be the suggested folder structure. Maybe Plex isn’t an option for me?

17

Judging from your screenshots above, you have done it correctly already.

Are you still testing a single artist? Because if you point a library to the artist folder directly, it is missing a required folder level for the matching.
i.e. /data/files/Music ← correct
/data/files/Music/Grateful Dead ← incorrect

18

At this point I am testing all artists, so the library is anchored at the right level (scanner can see the artist folders). The incorrect matches I am getting are not way out in left field as far as having the wrong artist or anything. Some examples to illustrate:

  • A reissue of 10 or so studio albums across about as many years as a box set. I’ve broken it up so each album can be shown on its original release year (my preference), but perhaps because there are not matches for each component release out on the web, these albums are matched to and combined with their associated original releases, so for each studio album I end up with one concatenation, rather than two separate albums, one of which is remastered and has bonus content. The folders are named differently (one has the box set name as a suffix), and the Album tag is different in the same way as well.

  • Things that have never been released are somehow matched to something (maybe other users submitted metadata for live shows?), and so their choices for disc information, some of which put tracks on the wrong disc and therefore out of order, get pulled into my album.

  • One release I have comprises six shows over a few years. All Album tags for the shows are unique (different date in the album name). The shows are also in different folders. Somehow Plex has bundled all this back up into a 14 disc box set, which I don’t want.

Is there no way to use supported agents and scanners and rely solely on file metadata?

19

Is this a new library? If so, did you activate ‘prefer local metadata’ in there as well?

20

Yes and yes. At least for the disc number issue, I think part of the issue is that I don’t tag files for that, as I don’t care about disc numbers. Maybe local metadata is being preferred where it exists, but where it does not, as with disc numbers, it is being downloaded.

That’s part of what’s driving my desire to configure the library to only look at local tags.