Plex keeps combining 2 different versions of same album

The album is Slipknot’s Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses. I have the standard release of the album which I bought on CD and ripped to FLAC and then I have one song I downloaded from the second disc of the Special Edition which came out a year later. The extra song has a different album title (I’ve put Special Edition in the title), has different artwork, and it came out in a different year than the standard release. The extra song is also in a separate folder from the standard album. I’ve also tagged it as being on Disc 2 out of 2. The standard album has no disc numbers tagged at all (which it shouldn’t since it’s single disc release).

Despite all this – and despite having Local Media Assets selected for EVERYTHING in Agents – Plex combines these into one single album EVERY DAMN TIME!!! It uses the Special Edition cover art (which sucks) and sometimes will change the name of the original release to match the special edition. I’ve tried everything. The Plex Dance doesn’t work. I’ve tried just adding the standard release and then adding the track from Special Edition separately – no dice. It immediately reverts to treating everything like it’s the Special Edition.

Why is this aspect of library management so difficult at this point? Plex has been around for how long and still not figured this out? If I select local media assets then that should be all I need to do, right? Come on, man! I’m really starting to regret my Plex Pass at this point if something so simple can’t be fixed.

Edit: Another thing – this can’t be corrected by editing the info in the Plex client either. When I attempt to do that , I get “unexpected error”.

If you tag all your music that carefully, you should tell Plex to use your tags primarily.
Edit your music library, go to the Advanced tab, tick ‘use embedded tags’.

Afterward perform the Plex Dance “light”
(Omit step 4)

I will definitely do that . That setting was not checked. I’ll check back and let you know if it fixes the issue.

Just checking back…

So, this didn’t work. The ‘use embedded tags’ setting was not ticked but I changed that. Did the Plex dance. This time I left the offending track from the Special Edition out of the equation before scanning files. Every thing was fine. The library populated just as I expected it to. I moved the Special Edition track back into the Slipknot folder and scanned library files again. The same thing as before. No change. It adds it to the regular edition as disc 2 and changes the artwork.

Goddamn it.

Getting pretty sick of this. Especially since it’s not happening in my back-up server. Everything is fine there.

Try tagging it with disc #1
I have found that if you only have disc#2 in one album, Plex will go out and combine it with a disc #1 .

I’ll give that a try and report back.

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