I noticed that recently if I have “Song X” on multiple albums Plex has started applying the ratings of one of them to all of them. So if I say have an album from an artist and then a greatest hits album and a live album all 3 copies of “Song X” will get the same star ratings. Plex didn’t used to do this. It means that some of my smart playlists are now ending up with multiple copies of the same track.
Anybody experiencing this?
Anybody have any thoughts?
Thank you!
From what I’ve read, it’s not technically based on same-named tracks of an artist but individual recordings/releases. Theoretically, you can specify tracks on MusicBrainz as separate recordings, e.g. single / album / live version of a song. That way, the song should get a different unique identifier… and with that you could rate the songs individually.
That being said, such songs on different releases (album version, best-of album, compilation) are often the same recording — so MB won’t necessarily want to split those.
Hi Tom,
Thank you. That’s interesting. Would I specify by using a tagger like mp3tag or is the specifier in Plex?
No. That’s about metadata from MusicBrainz.
So how would I have Music rains specify which song version a track is? Use a tagger?
You would usually edit the metadata at its source. Keep in mind MusicBrainz have a review process for edits of their data. So if you declare stuff to be a different recording, that’s actually the same, you might be up against some resistance.
You might be able to use their app (Picard) to tag your own files and then overriding any recording data with its own unique reference). I don’t know if/how that’s going to work.
As someone who has a massive digital music library of Dance Genre (aka EDM) this makes my eyeroll. There’s a slew of white label underground bootlegs that can be found but are not honored in either MusicBrainz nor the Discogs databases and I sadly have to manually link these tracks/albums by manually tagging them. I PREFER to have my music libraries setup MY way, but we are so far past that discussion. Even though I am a believer of a democratic body having the upper hand cataloguing media using their set guidelines, there are times I really just want a PROPER manual override. While I respect Plex’s decision to use MusicBrainz for this data, and while it has brought out the JOY back into listening to music libraries in PlexAmp, it cannot be overstated enough that this will be a divisive discussion for all eternity due to people’s individual preferences.
Personally, one thing I would have like to see added is a field type for catalog our own INTERNAL ID’s. I won’t go into this as it seems like it would “reinvent the wheel” and be regressive to Plex’s ecosystem but it’s something I’ve found to be very useful in situations with Emby too. Show below is the EXTERNAL ID’s from database sources but what if Plex allowed us the OPTION to have our own INTERNAL ID’s to match against our own. I know the Plex team will hard pass on this idea but it would reduce some pressure off the need to constantly fight with external database and their own strong-arming board of perfectionists, just saying. 
Sample of these discussions: MusicBrainz Case Study : The reality of MusicBrainz Database Consistency - #3 by Florian - Off-Topic - Mp3tag Community
