Server Version#: 1.16.1.1291
Player Version#: not sure where to find this
I have two albums by the artist Strawberry Girls, both titled Italian Ghosts. One is from 2011; the other from 2017. When I add the artist’s discography to my library (these two albums and two others), a few problems occur:
The album art for both albums is, erroneously, identical
The year for both albums is, erroneously, identical
The songs from the 2017 album are split into two separate albums, spanning tracks 1-6 and then tracks 7-10 (this happens even if I add only the 2017 album to my Plex server, that is to say, without the 2011 album)
One song’s name is truncated, and I have no idea why, Both the filename and the track name are correct in the file
This occurs even though my folder structure is consistent throughout my hard drive: Artist/Year - Album/01 Track Name | 02 Track Name … and the metadata for each album are perfect.
I suppose my broader question is: why does Plex seem to insist on using its own metadata agents (in particular for album artwork) when I have explicitly told it to prioritize embedded tags? I find it often uses low-res versions of the artwork that it already has available through the files themselves and I have to manually select the proper version of the art.
As an album can always contain songs from different years, Plex won’t (and in principle shouldn’t) separate them. Solution is to change the album name slightly, ie, “Italian Ghosts (EP)” for the 2011 one.
Truncation issue is another thing, perhaps the file still has an IDv1 tag? If so you can strip that with any tag editor.
I appreciate the workaround, but I’m not sure I agree with this:
an album can always contain songs from different years
… as an album is released all at once; regardless when the songs were written, composed, or originally released, I believe that they should all have the same release year as part of the album.
Truncation issue is another thing, perhaps the file still has an IDv1 tag? If so you can strip that with any tag editor.
You can maintain a strict “year = physical album release year”, but this makes it impossible to navigate or filter by year in any practical way, unless you like getting Elvis in your “90’s Rock tunes” playlists.
Well, for starters I wouldn’t say Elvis is rock… And I think any carefully maintained playlist would take into account something like compilation albums and make exceptions where those make sense.
Manual playlisting works for small libraries, but as soon as your library runs in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of tracks (i’ve got hundreds of retrospective compilations), it gets impossible to manually curate these things, and you rely on filters/smart playlists.
In principle Plex could support separate fields for Release Date and Original Release Date (and there’s a feature request for that so hopefully we’ll get there one day) but as it is, it’s most practical to use the year of original release.
