Server Version: 1.20.3.3437
I have tagged all my files with MP3Tag, source is MusicBrainz.
For some artists I get splitted albums, for example this one:
And this is how it looks like in MP3Tag
All tracks with featuring… are sperated. Instead of grouping the album tracks by the “album name” or the “album artist” Plex uses the “artist”.
m3u playlist is also in the folder (with all tracks of one album).
How can I change this behaviour in Plex?
My experience when this happens is the meta tags are not exactly the same. Make sure they are the same.
Also folder structure is important.
Try this folder structure:
Artist / AlbumArtist - AlbumTitle / 01 - TrackArtist - TrackName.ext
This works really well for Various Artist albums. And it helps but is hit or miss with albums that have featuring artists.
Please drag/paste the screenshot directly into the message composer window of this forum.
Please don’t crop your screenshots, so that one cannot even see the column titles.
Your screenshot doesn’t show how the AlbumTitle and TrackNumber meta tags of every track look like.
These are important.
TrackNumber must be present (filled with a number).
AlbumTitle must have the same content for all tracks of that album.
Which means it mustnot contain things like “disc 2” etc.
There is a separate meta tag for the disc number.
Thanks for the replies so far, and for the suggestion with renaming the folders.
Nevertheless I prefer to keep my folder structure: Artist / Year - Album Title / 01 - Track
For Compilations/Soundtracks: Album Title (Year) / 01 - Artist - Track
About the Tags - they come directly from Musicbrainz: every track is correctly numbered and album artist & album title are the same on every track (Sorry about that, it’s true, not everything can be seen on my MP3Tag screenshot).
Plex splits the Album: one half: songs with Artist Volor Flex, second half with Artist Volor Flex feat. …
What I need would be an option in Plex: look for the album artist / album title tag, not for the “track” artist.
Then you will have continued isses with Plex.
Plex unfortunately does not work very well with albums where the songs have different artists, years or genres. It’s nothing the developers can easily fix (it’s due Plex’s internal database design). Its reliance on very specific folder naming doesn’t make it easier.
You either have to live with Plex’s limitations or move to another music server, there are many.
By the way, for only a few albums, you can manually merge the split albums. In Plex Web, album view, select both albums, top right menu, merge.
I have the same problem. My music has been tagged using MusicBrainz Picard (when able–hoever it sometimes cannot find an album in MusicBraniz for more obscure albums) and any other metadata is then edited using JRiver MediaCenter. The only “other” metadata I edit is Genre because MusicBraniz has some crazy genres. Sometimes I will re-save the file using MediaCenter’s “Rename, Move & Copy Files” tool to ensure the naming is also correct. The only naming convention I have strayed from is in the filename, particularly on multidisc albums I have it save “Disc# - Track# - Title.ext” all within the album’s folder so if I look in a folder I can tell if a track is on disc one or two and it will also list the tracks in order in the folder. That naming convention does not seem to make a difference in Plex (from what I can tell as most albums are not affected like this). This happens regardless of the number of discs in an album. It will pull random tracks out of the middle of an album and put them in their own duplicate album.
I think Plex is not really interessted in a solution, other than saying, change your folder structure.
Wondering for what MP3Tags are for, when Plex ignores them in this case.
Nevertheless I can live with this bug, Plex is the best solution for Music for me.
Before I tried Emby and several others.
My folder structure is as Plex recommends. The only difference is in the naming of the file for multi-disc albums but the multi-disc albums are not the issue as it does not separate the albums by disc number but rather random tracks within the album in which all the metadata is the same. Furthermore, changing the advanced library settings to prefer local metadata does not fix the issue. I’ve done that with a complete re-scan and nothing.
I don’t understand the “under the hood” of Plex enough to understand how they’re sorting the music database. What I do know is it’s not by metadata. I’m even suspicious about it doing it at the folder level as it still separates albums within the same folder, with the same metadata, even after a re-scan of the library.
I can tell you in JRiver MediaCenter all the sorting is done by tags. If you have one album but the tags have a slightly different album artist (like “Bob Dylan” vs “Bob dylan”) it’ll separate them. But if you get all the metadata the same, even if the tracks are in different folders it will show them as the same album. That is why I use that program to make sure the metadata is exactly the same–it’s easy to identify the mistakes.
Another problem I’ve had with Plex in this regard is I’ll fix the problem either by using the merge function within Plex or by resaving all the files within an album and rescanning in plex and the the problem will go away but only until Plex does another automatic scan then it will separate them again. I love Plex and I want it to be my one-stop media solution but this music thing has got me frustrated. The only other option I’ve been looking at is Roon but they’re proud of their product. A monthly subscription to them is as much as a Spotify or Tidal subscription and a lifetime license is $700! (used to be $500). But I have not given it a try so for all I know it would have the same problems.
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