If you have an artist with an album that is too similar, but say the only major difference is the year, 2000 vs 2007. Plex will keep the same year for both albums… Even though the embedded metadata shows the correct year.
This can be an issue for albums that are re-released a different year then the original and maybe you have both in your library…
Sometimes there is an additional issue with this that is similar for artwork.
The first Album “Exist” is a single from 2019, and the other is an album from 2017, here is a pic of the tags, local artwork is embedded and included in the album folder:
EDIT: I’ve seen this issue for a long time, just finally getting to report it. I’m sure I’m not the only one that has this issue… also changing the artwork via the plex gui does not work, because it will actually change it for both…
How would Plex (or any other player for that matter) know the difference between two releases wirh the same artist and name (but different years), and a compilation album with songs from different years on it (ie, a “best of” album)?
The solution (in Plex and other library software) is to rename the Album name, eg “Exist” and “Exist (Single)” or “Thriller” and “Thriller (2015 Remaster)”.
In the example I gave above, they actually have 2 different album names, so its not just limited to albums that have almost the same title… I agree, if they have the same exact title it may be more difficult, but in theory. Plex should be creating a database entry for each, so even if the album has the same name, it should be possible to import the correct year for both database entries and display them properly…
Those are 2 different albums, with different years and they are in separate folders… Not one album with multiple songs that have different years… like your suggesting…
In every case that I’ve seen it, it is separate albums with separate years, being given the same value…
Nope, tagging using beets/picard/mp3tag, maybe I’ll see if I can provide some sample files here. I think the issue in the example above is caused by having a track that has the same title (essentially, same song, bit not exact same file), exists in both albums and plex gets confused…
One is a single, the other is a full album that contains the song. And somehow plex is linking them together for some of the information… Like I said I see this a lot when you have albums, eps and singles that can contain some of the same tracks between them…
If you only ever just have an albums, you’d probably never see this issue…
Edit: Mostly everything I have is FLAC/OPUS (Vorbis Tags), but I have seen this issue all formats I’ve used, even if they are all the same format. (MP3, OPUS (ffmpeg: libopus), FLAC).
I’m hoping the metadata fixes in the future resolve this issue, but I wanted to report it because I haven’t seen anyone else report it…
