This is crazy behavior, I can reproduce this bug and it seems bad.
With a multi-disc set, if there are tracks with identical titles on more than one of the disks, then all such tracks have their discnum changed to the highest discnum in the set, and their track numbers changed to whatever their tracknum is on that highest discnum.
This wreaks havoc on such boxsets (I have many of these) where there is a standard-def CD early in the set followed by high-res version on later DVD or Bluray. So here I put on Disk 4 of the set and hear every song twice if the song was also on disc1.
In this case by clicking getinfo on each of the files I can see they are 44.1K and 96K side by each. Disc numbers and track numbers have been changed. I know which file is which, naming scheme is:
Artist/Album/discnum_tracknum_title.flac
I use musicbrainz to tag my rips. they have all discnum populated correctly but in this case seems to be disrespected by Plex due to a bug.
Still looking at logs, I’ve stripped an empty library down to a single test case so I can retry this endlessly.
I can’t be the only one to have seen this. forgive me, I’m new here.
This happens somehow on the track title matching, I’m sure. The titles of this release on disk one are slid to alongside their disc4 counterparts somehow.
It’s obvious because the lone disc1 track without at match on disc4 is left behind. see this screenshot of the result, and thanks for taking a look.
OK, thanks for that suggestion. I created subdirs for each of the 4 discs and mv’d the proper files to each. Without making any other changes to the tags.
Basically the same issue but reversed now… hmm. I’m going to go find out if anything in the verbose/debug logs gives a clue.
This has been happening across my collection (e.g I have like 12 of these jethro tull sets and even more king crimson ones), I was just using this sample to demonstrate the issue.
Well, spent some time looking at logs of scanning a single album into an otherwise empty server.
From what I can tell looking at debug logs, my theory is that there is some sonic fingerprinting happening which identifies the low-res and high-res versions of the same song as being the identical. This happens regardless of tags, when a sonic match is found the song title, track#, disc# (probably other tags) are changed before entering into the plex database.
Note that I am able to go into the plex web client tag editor and fix this nonsense by hand, but I have way too many instances of this to be practical.
Now you may think what purpose could there be to have multiple copies of the same song in different resolutions. (You might ask Steven Wilson… lol.) To me this is missing the point, it’s about data integrity.
I can’t help but wonder if this occurs across releases, i.e. if a track is on a “greatest hits” or whatever if it coaligns with the album the hit is on, etc. Might run some experiments.
LMS, roon, subsonic, kodi music scanners all respect these file tags, all of these are in use around my house from time to time and I checked there is no issue with this data on other platforms. Apparently plex has a problem with this by being too smart?
