Fixing "Split" albums in Plex Music

I have a bunch of albums that are showing as 2 copies of the same album, with some tracks in one album and some tracks in the other album.

My Talking Heads ripped CD collection was showing up this way. I used Beets to retag everything and rescanned my music library, but they were still showing up as split.

The only way I fixed it was to copy the whole “Talking Heads” directory out of my music library, rescan, then copy it back in and rescan again.

Is there a faster way to combine 2 albums?

You could have selected the duplicated albums and merged them.

If you want to figure out why the albums get split in the first place, some things to look for:

  • Make sure the Album Artist tag is identical in every file.
  • Make sure the Album Title tag is identical in every file.
  • Make sure the disc number tag is populated in every file.
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Is there away for Plex to show me all duplicate albums so I can merge them?

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OK, I checked 3 different albums now. Album Artist, Album Title, Disc number is the same. I can’t find anything different between the tracks other than the track names, lyrics, Musicbrainz fingerprints, acousticID and ReplayGain values.

But I have a LOT of split albums to clean up.

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Someone else (semi-)recently did some digging and found the tracks differed by parent ID. It would be interesting to know if you are having the same issue (and then why that’s happening, of course)

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I am having the exact same issue. A fix from the Plex team would be appreciated.

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I have that from time to time. It is usually my fault because I have local data preferred and on closer inspection with mp3tag, some metadata is not consistent. As this happens only once in a while, I never bothered writing a python script with plexapi for that, If you have a LOT of issues, my starting point for a script would be to identify the duplicate albums (same ratingKey? Different guid?) and use the “merge” method in plexapi for the identified albums. Maybe that helps someone.
EDIT: (But don’t forget to clean up your metadata first!)

To be clear, the MP3 tags are consistent though. And my library is way too large to manually merge them all. Tracks from same actual album split into multiple Plex albums

Seems crazy that we can’t actually get in touch with people from Plex to get to the bottom of this =/ This clearly affects a bunch of us!

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I don’t know if you’re still using “Personal media files” as your agent. Your old thread mentioned them.
In general: Use “Plex Music” for both Scanner and Agent. All the other stuff is outdated, unsupported, and will go away rather sooner than later.

With that out of the way: there are some basics which you want to adhere to.
Unless you do, you will be struggling with Plex.

Take your time and go through this thread (and also follow the links in there): Why is Plex ignoring all the metadata on my MP3? [SOLVED]

Thanks for the quick reply, @OttoKerner ! I’m using Plex Music for scanner and agent and I have “Prefer Local Metadata” selected. As I’d said in my post previously, the files in question have pristine ID3 tags with all relevant matching fields. I concede that if the Album Artists are different that they will be in different albums. My concern is for when that is not the case.

In one sample case, the first track of the album appears in a different Plex album than the rest of the tracks. None of these files have “Album Artist” set. The folder hierarchy is
Music/<Artist>/<Album>/. Furthermore, when I look at the XML data of the tracks in both albums, they share the same parentGuid (parentGuid=“plex://album/5d07c8ec403c640290c413d9”) but have differing parentKeys (parentKey=“/library/metadata/39140”, parentKey=“/library/metadata/15409”),

Looking at the following screenshot of the files in question loaded in Kid3, it will display any values in the ID3 tags that are identical, and show “≠” for the fields which are not identical.

Over the years that this has been going on, I have deleted and re-added my music library multiple times and with different agents/scanners to try to help. If you think that will help I can do it again.

Then you should rectifiy this and add this tag.
If you enable “prefer local metadata”, you absolutely need it. Even more so, if your folder structure is not as recommended in my above link. The format string in your screenshot implies that you don’t have an Artist folder level, but just Album folders.

Another thought which just occured to me:
Try disabling “periodic” and “automatic” library updates.
Only trigger a scan of the music library manually, after you have verified that all files are present and are named like they are supposed to, and contain proper metadata.
This is supposed to

  1. prevent from two library scans occuring concurrently
  2. prevent the scanning while a file copy is still in progress, so that a first scan does only scan a few tracks (or just a single track) of a newly added album.

Ah, there was a formatting error in my previous post - I forgot to escape (\) the <. My folder structure is indeed what you recommend:
Music/<Artist>/<Album>/

Adding the “Album Artist” tag to each of my files seems like a very unfortunate solution. If I were going to write a script to do that across my whole library, I’d wonder about writing a script to clean up the XML instead or, better yet, trying to contribute to the Plex Music scanner/agent, or creating my own (I think they are trying to deprecate the scanner API though?).

Is it possible to have two scans concurrently? My periodic scans are just once daily, so I’d be surprised if this were the issue but I could definitely try to turn that off and recreate the whole library.

Unfortunately it is. That’s why you need to avoid it.

I’m pretty sure you can use your existing artist folder names to derive suitable Album Artist tags in Kid3.

The XML doesn’t exist. It is simply generated for you from the database when you request it.

Hello,

This had been happening to me for a long time. I just noticed that the ID3v1 tags were blank or incorrect, even though the ID3v2 tags were correct. Since I was using iTunes, using ID3v2 tags has been fine for years, but that’s not the case for Plex, it seems to use ID3v1 tags from MP3s most of the time.

I used the “from Tag 2” feature on Kid3 to replicate them to the ID3v1 set. It is not perfect though, sometimes tracks or the album names do not copy. I had a fill out a few manually. I did solve most of my problems, I’m still sorting out a few, but it could just be a large library taking time to update.

It is interesting that some of my albums used the ID3v2 if the ID3v1 tags are blank, but not always (!?). It also exclusively uses ID3v2 tags with my mp4 or non-mp3 files. I don’t understand the logic of not just using ID3v2 tags for everything though.

Hope this helps you as well.

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