Hello. I use MusicBrainz to help fill metadata tags on my music. One thing that bothers me is albums that have been re-released (for example, LPs that were released to CD). Let’s take Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother, for example. The “originaldate” is 1970-10-10, and “originalyear” is 1970. However, the CD remaster that it was ripped is from 1994, thus the “date” is 1994. Unfortunately, Plex uses the plain “date” field for sorting and display. Therefore, Atom Heart Mother appears to be newer than CDs released 20 years after it.
Is there a way to customize the local agent to specify a prioritized list of date field “if isset(originaldate) then orginaldate else date”? I would change my tags to precompute this into the “date” field, but then I lose the metadata about the actual (nonorignal) release date. I could move this to a new field, but ID3v2 doesn’t have any official field for this as far as I can see.
The sorting should look for the original date first and in the absence of that fall back to the date tag.
It seems like a small thing but a music nerd like myself sometimes likes to listen to music by decade and having Miles Davis Bitches Brew play in the 2010 year is annoying.
Thanks trumpy81. Considering the definition of TYER, it states “recording”, not “release”. So, this should solve my problem without flexing the IDv3 standard. I’m not so concerned about precision beyond a year for sorting/filtering. Like JoeC3 said, I just don’t want my music skipping decades, and I want the album listing under an artist to be somewhat accurate.
I didn’t realize Plex acknowledges this field, but I’ll retag a portion of my troublesome files and report back.
Long time Plex Pass user, first time forum poster. In fact, I logged into the forums tonight in search of a way to have Plex do this exact thing: Use the album’s original release date instead of the remaster date.
I store my music in flac, so ID3 tags don’t really apply. In addition I use beets to manage my music. Beets relies on MusicBrainz and Discogs to ensure the metadata is accurate. The result is the “date” tag being used for the media/remaster date, and “original_date” has the albums original release date.
I’m hoping that after a year, maybe this feature is now available? If not, I’ll be making a stop at the feature request area…
It is working with flacs just fine, if you put the release date into the vorbis ‘year’ tag.
But you must use the internationally recognized format yyyy-mm-dd.
Make sure that your library has the check box ‘use embedded metadata’ activated.
The Local Media Assets agent must be positioned above of ‘last.fm/Plex premium music’, so embedded metadata can override the data from the online metadata sources.
Yes, I have “use embedded metadata” activated for the music library, and the “Local Media Assests” is positioned at the very top above all others.
I initially thought the problem is beets saves the remaster date to the year and date tag and the original release date to original_year and original_date. So for example, I have a remastered CD of Yes’s album Fragile, which looks like:
> beet info Yes Fragile Roundabout | grep -e year -e date
date: 2003-02-17
original_date: 1971-11-12
original_year: 1971
year: 2003
However, in the web UI, it is definitely not using the original date.
I’ve noticed albums where beets has saved the same date to both sets of tags, then Plex reports it correctly.
> beet info A Night in Tunisia |grep -e year -e date
date: 1960-01-01
original_date: 1960-01-01
original_year: 1960
year: 1960
So I just deleted the whole Music library, restarted my plex docker and added back the Music library, all to ensure it is using the proper agents. While it is still running, early indications again point to Plex not honoring the original_date or original_year tags in the local files.
> beet info Coltrane Blue Train |grep -e year -e date
date: 1985-01-01
original_date: 1957-01-01
original_year: 1957
year: 1985
I think this shows that Plex is using Internet sources even though I’ve ranked the “Local Media Assets” first. If it was, then the Plex date should be 1957-01-01, or at the very least it would be 1985-01-01, and not 1985-04-20.
Happy to debug this further if anyone can point me in the right direction!
I created a test library and used default settings and it worked. I found out that the issue was having prefer local metadata checked in the library advance section. Uncheck it, refresh and all is good.
I can confirm this worked. Under “Manage Library” > “Edit…” > “Advanced”, and I unchecked the “Prefer local metadata” option. I then performed a complete rescan of metadata via “Manage Library” > “Refresh All Metadata”. Now albums are shown with their original release date. Schweet!
However, I fear some local metadata changes that I want to persist will now be overridden by remote metadata. But I’ll take it for now.
I’m still finding this to be an issue, and it’s driving me nuts since I’m currently trying to get plex to properly show my music.
I’m only using the date tag, but I’m finding that PLEX is ignoring the month and day and just going alphabetical by year. So albums under Artist don’t get sorted in a proper chronological order. Instead, the titles look like this:
A 2020-12-12
B 2020-02-12
C 2020-03-12
I have everything set to “Oldest First”. as the library default.
+1 for this as well (same issue w/ MusicBrainz date metadata). I’m confused as to how unchecking “Prefer local metadata” fixes it, does Plex still read all/most the local tags, and enhance where it finds other data (such as with date), or is something else going on?
I suspect that unchecking the “Prefer local metadata” has ramifications that are not completely clear/visible. And I consider this a workaround, rather than a solution. A real solution would be support of original date/year tags when using the local metadata.
Sorry, do you mean that if you uncheck that box for the library, it will then show the albums in correct chronological order? Does it effect anything else? I have some custom groupings that I’m forcing PLEX to do to display various artist type titles as individual releases as opposed under a Various Artist tab. and fixing all that will be a real mess.
