Multiple Tracks Rating Issue & Duplicate GUIDs

[SE2Dev]

Server Version#: 1.21.4.4079
Player Version#: N/A

I recently importing my various track ratings from other sources into my current Plex library, and noticed shortly afterwards that there were a handful of tracks that had ratings that I had not explicitly set. After doing some more digging, I noticed that the ratings for certain tracks appear to be shared across multiple versions of the same track, as long as they’re both under the same artist.

For example the following tracks share the same rating:

Initially, I thought this may have been caused by a bug in the script I wrote to import the ratings - where perhaps it was identifying songs by artist/track title but ignoring the album. I later noticed, however, that if I were to set the rating for one of the affected tracks via Plex Web, Plex Desktop, Plexamp, etc., all affected tracks with the same artist & title would receive the new rating. I’ve also confirmed that this happens on both the Synology and Windows versions of Plex Media Server, as well as on a fresh Plex Media Server installation. This seems to imply that there’s something strange happening with Plex itself.

This is particularly frustrating for tracks where I wish to have a separate rating for different versions of the song, especially if I’m trying to create a smart playlist filtered by rating; in many cases, multiple versions of the song will be included as a result.

This issue doesn’t appear to be present in all instances where a given artist has multiple tracks with the same title, though.

I seem to have 9 versions of Scorpions’ Wind of Change in my library, but as you can see above, only 6 of them are sharing the same rating. For any one of the affected tracks, if assign a rating and refresh the page (or check the library by other means), all 6 of those tracks will have the new rating. The 3 tracks that don’t have any rating assigned do not appear to be affected by this issue at all.

I checked the XML metadata that Plex provided for these tracks, only to see that for any given set of affected tracks, they will all share the same guid. The ratingKey, parentGuid, will be different for each track, but if the guid is the same, the tracks appear to be affect. For the example above, the 3 tracks that aren’t affected all have different guids.

Would I be correct in assuming that this isn’t intended behavior? Is there any way that this can be addressed?

[SE2Dev]

This seems to be related How Do Star Ratings Work Across Multiple Song Of The Same Artist?

Update: Upon further investigation this behavior does seem to stem from the fact that all affected tracks possess the same “Recording ID”, a relationship which is described here. I believe the Plex GUIDs should be based on the track ids.

In fact, both MusicBrainz Picard and mutagen seem to map the musicbrainz_recordingid to track id for various formats. In Picard’s case, this seems to definitely be intentional, so it’s likely that mutagen followed their example - unfortunately this leads to really strange behavior in Plex, and I’m really not sure what the best solution would be; perhaps some sort of toggle that tells the scanner/agent to prefer the real musicbrainz_trackid instead?

[therayne]

I’m having the same issue every time I have a multi-CD album. To work around this I need to create a new folder per album and append “CDx” to the album tag. My albums don’t use the Music Brainz Recoding ID, but do use Music Brainz Album ID.

This bug is driving me crazy!

Server Version: 1.22.2.4282, Running on Windows 10