Music file track numbering problem

[PaulB]

Version#: 1.15.8.1198

I’m having trouble getting MP3 files that have had their ID3 tags edited in MP3Tag from organising correctly. Specifically, files where the artist name starts with a number appear to be using that number as the track number. None of the other items in the album folder have a track number which is throwing the alphabetical ordering out of whack. I’ve taken some screenshots:

This shows the tracks in Windows file explorer, as you can see, no track numbers

This is the view of the tracks in MP3Tag, again, no track numbers, in the “Extended Metadata” popup, the track ID3 metadata tag is not present:

This is the album view presented in Plex, the track numbers look suspiciously like the artist names:

This last view is when clicking Edit on one of the tracks:

It’s also worth noting that Plex insists that all the tracks are “Disc 1” even though the “discnumber” ID3 tag is also missing but I can live with that.

Has anyone else had problem?

[OttoKerner]

Plex doesn’t do “single tracks”.
It always wants an “album”/“release” into which it can put the track.
And it tries to gather information about the album. Of which the track number is one.

Since you omitted the track number even from your embedded meta tags, Plex tries to parse the file name and intelligently guess the track number.
And your file names are starting with a number. Plex cannot know that these numbers are really part of the artist name.

[PaulB]

Brilliant, thanks for the explanation, I changed the file naming schema and it’s fixed the issue I was having.

[JopoJP]

Little workaround:
Add “01” to your songs which. This way Plex would fetch it as track one.

Basically add to all their tracknumber infront. As i wrote Plex tries to fetch filename. ID3 almost makes no sense for Plex. At the moment atleast.

So if have an album with wrong order rename them.
Example:
01 - Song.mp3
02 - Song.mp3

If you renamed the files, let Plex rescan the Libary. It should see that the files has been renamed. After that do a “Metadata refresh”. This should fetch it new and should fix it.

[PaulB]

Yeah cool, thanks for that. I did some file renaming and things are better.

I guess I was assuming that Plex would respect ID3 tagging of music files.

IMO track numbering shouldn’t be assumed. This folder has around 500 songs in it. It’s not really an album, more like a playlist so track numbers don’t make sense. I just want all 500 songs sorted alphabetically by track name, like Cloudplayer Platinum does on my android phone and Groove Music on my Windows 10 PC.

[JopoJP]

Use a third party filemanager like Total Commander. You can rename multiple Files/Folders in seconds and choose whcih way. A-Z or Date Created etc.

So you need A-Z. I renamed i seconds my entire libary (6534 Tracks) in seconds.