Doing the Plex Dance again, but seeing new odd behavior

[oshunluvr]

We all are familiar with the “Plex Dance” aren’t we? You know, when your metadata or file details don’t correctly display and for some reason you can’t fix them, so you move the files off the server, rescan, move the files back, rescan, and magically all lines up again. I find this really annoying, but I have not had to do it for quite awhile since I got better at making sure the tags were correct before copying files onto the server.

Server Version#: 1.20.0.3181-0800642ec on Ubuntu 18.04 server being accessed through Chromium browser:

Odd behavior #1: I recently I noticed many albums in my music collection had divided themselves into two albums, randomly splitting the songs into two apparently identical albums. Don’t know exactly when or why this occurred, but 100’s of albums ended up this way. I assume this occurred during some scan or another.

Odd behavior #2: For some of the time, I could just “Unmatch” one of the two identical albums, re-match it, and they would merge back into a single album again. However, if I selected “Fix Match” nothing happens and the manual “Match” command stops working. I have to close the browser window and re-launch Plex in the browser before I can use “Match” again.

Odd behavior #3: About half the time, the above procedure (manually unmatching, then matching) would create a whole new entry for the Artist, leaving not only a split album but also a split artist!. This seems to be related to the artist itself. If one album failed to merge, so did any others in that artist. The only way to fix it was to manually unmacth/match all the albums and they would all move to the newly created artist. Once in awhile, I re-matched the Artist instead of the album and this worked sometimes as well.

Odd behavior #4: About half-way through my collection, I started re-running the artists who had the split albums through “MusicBrainz Picard” and re-saving the tags. Once in awhile, a tag would actually be changed from when I did them previously, but not often. Then a “Refresh Metadata” would fix it, but not very often.

Odd behavior #5: Sometimes, none of the above worked, and the “Plex Dance” was my only option.

This is so all-over-the-place I doubt any solutions would be forthcoming but I wanted to share this in case someone else had experienced it or knew an easier way to fix it, plus I wanted to vent.

The only real significant change to my setup or server was last year a friend passed away and I inherited his extensive music collection and I added a couple hundred albums to my server. However, this splitting of albums and artists was not limited to the new additions.

[aubrey.wodonga]

Hi @oshunluvr,

I’ve personally seen the “album split into two parts” issue quite a bit. 99% of the time, in my case, it was caused by changing the file name or path of music in my library. If you’re using Picard, there’s a setting to update filenames:

Plex doesn’t like when the file names change. It’s a known issue, but I can’t say when/if it’ll be fixed.

In the interim, try to avoid renaming your music after it’s been added to Plex already. My workflow for new music is basically:

1. Modify the MusicBrainz release if necessary
2. Put the album through Picard
3. Save / rename the files in place (outside of my Plex library)
4. Copy the files to my Plex library, and kick off a scan

Doing it in this order has prevented the album split issue for me.

One last thing: if you do see the issue again, you can select both duplicate albums using the select boxes in the upper left of the album art, and then from the ... menu, use the Merge feature, as below:

This is a bit quicker, and less error-prone than the ‘unmatch, rematch’ process.

Let me know if this helps at all

[oshunluvr]

I haven’t renamed anything, like for years. When I first bought Plex, in 2015 it went through a couple iterations of various file storing and naming schemes until I got it where Plex liked it, but my current server file storage set-up has been static for several years - which is why I found it odd and annoying that this started. I spent an entire day going through every artist and fixing all the split albums.

The cause of my complaint was music files, properly tagged and sorted, left untouched for years, suddenly became split albums. I assume some upgrade to the server version combined with an arbitrary re-scan caused it.

The only thing I’ve done recently was to add a bunch of music all at once to my collection (from an inheritance) but I’m very methodical about properly naming, tagging with Picard and setting up album folder before moving files to the server. Split albums appeared in both new and existing albums.

Most of the time “Unmatch” followed by “Match” for both halves of an album seems to work. For some reason I haven’t bothered to explore, “Fix Match” does nothing except totally disable the “Match” function for all albums until I close the browser window out and log back in again

I didn’t notice or know about the “Merge” function. I’ll try that next time this happens - hopefully never. That’s sounds much quicker than what I’d been doing.

The other really odd thing was the Artist un-matching that randomly occurred while trying to re-combine the albums, Maybe 5 or 6 times during the whole process “Match” would move the split album out of the current artist folder, make a duplicate artist folder, and put the split album in it, resulting in split artist and album. It’s almost like some of the tags got too old to be correctly processed or something.