Why, Plex, when you present me with my music library of mp3 files, do you break apart so many of my albums into multiple albums each containing a portion of the songs? (I have the following settings in my CD library view in Plex: filter set to All, Albums view, and sorted By Title.)
What is the secret to get Plex to recognize a group of songs as one album? In Apple Music (formerly iTunes), it is really simple: Just give a group of songs the same Album Name and the same Album Artist name in the metadata, and they show up under a single album. You can even segregate CDs under that one album by using the “Disc X of X” field in the Apple Music metadata.
But Plex has, for example, taken a single Album consisting of 4 disks, with up to 36 tracks per disk, and turned it into 36 albums. It’s just crazy. In Apple Music this shows up a single album containing 4 disks. Apple Music has no issues displaying this correctly.
Someone tell me the secret of why Plex can’t figure out the very basics of mp3s containing metadata that has been written to the m3 files using Apple Music?
Check “Disc Number”. in the metadata. This would happen if by chance the album had songs with multiple disc numbers, like for a double album.
I used two ways to fix this problem, one automated and one manual. The automated way is to reset the disc numbers to 1 using python mutagen library, or manually using the plex merge feature.
I tried manually changing the disk numbers (say, to “disk 3 of 3”) and then back (to disk “1 of 1”) on several of these. Sometimes it cause Plex to reconsider. Other times it didn’t.
I have found a key point when working with plex is to be very suspicious of it’s caching mechanism(s). Here is what I do when rescanning ANYTHING.
1> Copy the entire item (movie/series/album) outside of plex. Leave the original intact.
2> Delete the item thru plex UI.
3> Do each of these in sequence, waiting for each step to complete before proceeding to the next.
clean bundles
optimize database
empty trash
4> Restore the item (reverse of step 1) and rescan.
Highly paranoid but it works for me 100% of the time where no other general approach does. You can of course do it in batches to multiple items at once.
Ugh. This may be a valid workaround, but the root issue here would be Plex’s behavior. The issue I have with this is that I manage my library in Apple Music, not Plex. I simply want Plex to inspect my library, and present it to me via streaming. I am not interested in editing/changing any metadata within Plex UI. I can certainly do step 3, but I’m not going to move the files outside my library and then put them back in (because I have Apple Music set up to auto-manage the library, which includes auto-renaming files). Bottom line, if it’s a Plex caching issue, then Plex needs to update their software to handle file changes. I think they already are aware of this, because I often see Plex rescanning an Album after I have changed its metadata in Apple Music in a vain attempt to get Plex to combine the multiple albums into a single album.
Sometimes I think I am still living in the software world of 1993, not 2020.
Think I’m making some progress on this. Despite having had “Prefer local metadata” selected (checkmarked) the entire time, it seems that Plex has been “matching” my songs to online records, just as it does for movies and tv shows. So for example on one album, it matched tracks 1, 3-8, and 10 to an online album record, but did not match tracks 2 and 9 to anything. Once I manually “match” both of these albums with their included tracks to the same online album record, then they merge.
Frankly, this whole ordeal is just assinine, especially since I have “prefer local metadata” checked, “genres” set to “embedded tags”, and Album Art set to “local files only”. Unfortunately, the scanners and agents don’t give me the option to stay local. For scanner, I have two options: Plex Music and Plex Music Scanner. I have tried both. For agent, I have three options: Personal Media Artists, Plex Music, and Last.fm. I frankly don’t understnad the difference between a scanner and an agent. I currently have both set to Plex Music.
Incidentally, I tried “Unmatch” with the unmatched album that had all but 2 tracks. That did not result in the two albums merging. I literally had to select the same match for both before they would merge.
Update: Now I’m working on another 4-track album that has been split into two albums, the first with 3 of the tracks, and the 4th with one track. Neither album was matched to an online album, and otherwise they have identical metadata (disc 1 of 1, track x of 4, etc) so I guess I’m back to square one on troubleshooting this pernicious Plex programming problem.
That does it. I’m done. Plex is a horrible music server. Randomly splits albums into 2 or 4 or more albums, with most of the tracks in one album and a track or two in each of the others. I’ll inspect each song’s data fields in Plex and they are COMPLETELY IDENTICAL in album name and album artist and in date released and in every other field. I’ll look and see that 3 of the 4 split albums are unmatched, and the 4th is matched. But even unmatching it does not cause it to merge with the other 3 ghost albums. This is ridiculous. It’s 2020, yet Plex’s scanners can’t figure out from mp3 file embedded metadata that all the tracks that have an identical ALBUM ARTIST and an identical ALBUM TITLE and that are in the same FILE SYSTEM FOLDER are from the same album. This isn’t rocket science, guys. So much for Plex. They’re obviously trying to do too much in one app, and are failing big time. Stick to video streaming, guys.
I’ll just upload my music to Google Play and then serve it via Chromecast to the TV. Forget Plex.
Unfortunately, I have a lot of custom / nonpopular music, as well as my own music, for which the only source of metadata is the .mp3 file itself. I spent a lot of time putting the metadata into these files using iTunes. I need for Plex to correctly interpret local metadata. That is what I need.
Plex should be able to correctly interpret an iTunes (Apple Music) music library. It’s not difficult to program, in the slightest. All that is required is an understanding of how iTunes manages music when iTunes settings are selected to automatically manage the music folders. It creates a nested folder structure under artist, within which are folders for albums. Why Plex feels the need to split the contents of these folders into separate albums is beyond me, especially since the metadata embedded in those .mp3 files is identical for the album title and album artist fields.
It’s 2020, but in some aspects of technology we’re still living in the year 2000.
Thanks heaps for that. I’ve been upgrading my iTunes m4p (Protected AAC) to m4a (Purchased AAC) files with an iTunes match subscription. I would then run the upgraded files through Picard Musicbrainz updating metadata and moving the files into the new folder watched by Plex.
I had an album that kept splitting as well.
If I updated the ID3 tags for the album name, and added an extra character on the end, it joined as one album. If I renamed the Album name ID3 tag back to the original, it split.
This 4 step process was the only thing that made plex put it back in the UI as a single album.
