Server Version#: 1.19.4.2935
Player Version#: 1.14.0.1340-0acc754c
In my music library, I have multiple versions of the same albums differing in quality/encoding. So there may be 4 copies of a single album: a “.flac” copy, an “.mp3”/320k bitrate copy, an “.mp3”/VBR bitrate copy, and an “.alac” copy.
There’s 2 main problems with this re: Plex:
- Plex show multiple copies of the album
- Even when merged into a single “album”, multiple copies of the tracks are shown
Firstly, I’d like a way to ignore duplicates based that only differ in format/quality.
Secondly, I’d like a way to tell Plex to ignore all but the best available quality of a given track.
A couple preemptive rebuttals might be:
- “But how would Plex determine the quality?”: The world widely agrees on some general rules about audio here in the year 2020. Lossless formats (ALAC, FLAC) > lossy formats (MP3). And the categories can be stratified further within their formats by bitrate (for lossy formats) and bit depth (for lossless formats).
- “But how would Plex know certain files (with differing sizes, file extensions, etc.) are duplicates?”: By the time my files are being fed into Plex, all formats are properly tagged and follow Plex’s grouping metadata/tag guidelines of Album Artist, etc. Barring that, Barcode, ISRC, Media, or even fetched metadata from a scanner could be used.
Anyway, thanks for your time in advanced, and for a great product in general!
~Isa
