Music album sorting when file types are mixed

Feature Suggestions
1

(Moved from the Plex Features forum - I had no response which suggests that maybe this post is a feature request rather than a config issue)

I have a number of albums of mp3s that had some of the tracks “upgraded” to a higher bitrate AAC file via iTunes Match. This works well in desktop music players and the iPhone Music app which appear to rely only on metadata to sort.

However my Synology-hosted Plex (accessed via Plexamp, Plex Web and the iOS app) insists on sorting on file extension (or type perhaps) before sorting on track metadata. This means that m4a files come before the mp3s, despite the track metadata being set up to otherwise sort correctly.

I don’t use the music side of Plex very much because Plex appears not to rely on track metadata only, and it’s not feasible to re-encode these files to the same file type because they’re lossy already.

If there’s no current way of forcing Plex to ignore the file type when sorting the album, could this be considered as a feature request please?

Many thanks!

2

I have done just that on a few occasions. It works.
The key is to populate the metadata of all tracks consistently.
Particularly the disc# and track# tags, of course.
The AlbumArtist and AlbumTitle meta tags must have identical content in all tracks.

And there is a way to tell Plex to use your embedded meta tags preferably:
Edit your music library, go to the ‘Advanced’ tab, tick ‘Use embedded tags’.

Do also make sure to include the track number into the file names.
e.g. 01. TrackArtist - TrackTitle.ext

After editing all the meta tags and file names, perform the Plex Dance with the album.

3

Hi. Thank you! Based on what you said I…

  1. Reviewed the tags of a few of the problem albums again (all were fine and consistent, although see later…)
  2. Created a new library
  3. Copied those example albums over to the new library

That fixed it for a few albums (so, the Plex Dance is the fix there then: it never occurred to me that a rescan wasn’t enough. Doh).

There were a couple of albums that still refused to sort properly. I dug into the tags with a more nuts-and-bolts tag editor and found that some had Compilation = 0, and others didn’t have Compilation at all. => iTunes wasn’t consistent when writing tags but treated a 0 value as equivalent to a missing tag, whereas Plex treats them as different cases. Sigh.

I removed the tag so they were all consistent. Rescanned the library - no effect. Removed album directory, rescanned library, re-added album directory, rescanned library: fixed.

So yes - I know what to do now. Thank you for the guide! I’ll close this feature request off then.