Server Version#: 1.27.0.5889
Player Version#: Web: 4.76.1, PlexAmp (Windows & Android): 4.2.2
Albums where I have specifically editedand locked the Date field so as to be the Release Date rather than the Original Date are, all of a sudden, sorted by (and show) the Original Date, even though the Date Field is still locked and hasn’t changed.
This happens also on PlexAmp (Windows and Android) unless you have enough albums to be forced to use the overflow menu, where they are now sorted by the Date Field (thusly in Release Date order as desired), but show the Original Date so appear out-of-sequence.
Further information on this. Having added another album in with an updated date, it appeared in the right place, so I went to an album that was (since whatever change brought about this issue) in the wrong place and edited it, and it moved into the right place. BUT just opening it for editing, and Saving it doesn’t work - you have to make an actual change, save it, then re-edit it to revert the change - there’s no way I’m doing that for everything that’s been broken by this!
Still, it seems newly added albums work correctly, but everything added before this change, with an edited “Originally Available” date, will likely be in the wrong place…
(Music) Album year and date fields could differ when preferring local metadata (#13591)
This sounds like it should be a fix for this issue but nothing appears to have changed after updating. I’ve also tried to Update Metadata on an offending artist but the incorrect date still shows in both Web and PlexAmp clients, and the albums are still sorted incorrectly.
Do you consider this fixed, and thus does it mean that every album which was broken like this will need to be manually edited (as per my post above) to get back to how things were?
(I very much don’t want to have to do anything library-wise as I have almost 15,000 albums, many, many of which have user-edited data - a massive amount effort to lose completely!)
(Scanner) Album release date tags could be imported incorrectly from tags when using the legacy music scanner (#13560)
I don’t understand now why things are still ordered incorrectly. The albums contain the correct (release) date, manually entered in the Originally Available field - it shows correctly when you edit the albums. But still they are ordered by the original available date of that album as pulled from musicbrainz.org…
So somewhere in the misplaced albums (hidden) data it must be holding that original available date and the sorting algorithm is using that, rather than the actual Originally Available field, to order the releases.
As mentioned above, if I (now) manually (re-)edit the Originally Available field, the sorting is correct, so does editing that field repopulate correctly the hidden field, or does it affect the sorting algorithm (less likely, ime)?
It seems to me that a few versions back, you changed one or both of the following things: the sorting algorithm (to look at a hidden field for dates) and how that field was populated - originally from musicbrainz.org when the album was first scanned and now from the Originally Available field when the album is edited, or a new album is created - am I right?
I have e.g., eight ABBA Deluxe Editions released from 2006 to 2014, and they are, under the Artist, sorted from 1973 to 1980 alongside with the original albums. The correct release date has been entered in the ‘originally available’ field, but are ignored it seems.
So I think I have the exact same error om my music library and after an upgrade to Plex Media Server for Windows, version 1.28.0.5998-adb79ff3b released on July 22, 2022, there is no automatic fix - not even after I have refreshed meta data.
So I have now made changes to some of my defect ABBA albums release dates (see below, what I did), and it’s looks good so far, but it remain to be seen if the error goes away whit this version. To me it’s seems like the error resurrects after planned tasks have been running.
Server Version#: 1.28.0.5999
Player Version#: Web: 4.84.1
Refreshing metadata on an artist where I have, since first raising this issue, changed the date to get it to move back and then correcting the date again (as described above) resets the albums back to their incorrect location, while still keeping the locked, corrected date.
This hasn’t yet been fixed, nor even acknowledged by a Plex staff member (in this thread at least) but it is clearly a bug, and wrong, as the sort order does not match the displayed information in the edit box but is based on hidden, underlying information not visible to the user. It is unintuitive and frustrating.
I totally agree - after installing Server Version #: 1.28.0.5999 yesterday, today all my albums are again sorted and displayed on the wrong date, even though the ‘originally available’ field is unchanged and locked. So it’s seems like the error resurrects after planned tasks have been running the night between Monday and Thursday.
Yes, this is now the state of affairs. No matter what we do to order these albums as we want (and as they should be, and were before this bug was introduced), overnight Plex resets them all to the incorrect location again.
Why does Plex not honour its own interface? Why is it using hidden data to change the sort-order of albums and ignoring the interface-accessible date field and it’s lock?
Still no fix for this, nor even acknowledgement by Plex Staff. I mean, if someone just came out and said “Yeah, we’ve changed the way this works - we want everything sorted by the date the initial release of that album occurred - deal with it” then that would be something.
But that’s clearly not the intended behaviour as newly added (or newly edited) albums go to their desired place in the sorting as per whatever you set the “Originally Available” field (which I understand is being co-opted against it’s name and, I assume, will) to be. It’s only after metadata is reloaded that they move back to a place that is based on their Original Release Date (as per Musicbrainz).
Do this and tell me it’s intended or desirable behaviour:
Edit the Originally Available field on any album to today’s date and lock it. Click Save Changes. It will move to the head the sorted albums for that artist.
Then select “Refresh Metadata” from the album’s three-dot drop-down menu. The album will move itself back to the Original Release Date (as per Musicbrainz) even though the Originally Available field is still locked and hasn’t changed or been reset.
Now re-edit the Originally Available field. (You have to change it by a day at least - just fiddling with it and then Saving Changes won’t do anything.) The album will move back to where you’ve set it.
Something in that process cannot be intentional behaviour as they are counter to one another. So, which is it?
(Music) Locking the date field for albums wouldn’t lock the year value (#13786)
So this still doesn’t fix this issue. Even editing the field, setting and resetting the locked status doesn’t stop the album from moving to where I want it until the next time Metadata is refreshed, at which point it just goes straight back to the wrong place in the sort.
At least, albums stay where I put them now, and survive multiple Refresh Metadata cycles, including the automatic overnight cycles.
Sadly, it doesn’t move things back that were displaced by the bug - I still need to manually edit the locked Originally Available field to a different (arbitrary) date and save, whence Plex will move it to wherever and I can re-edit it back to the correct value. Plex will then sort it correctly again and, it seems, leave it there!
So - credit where credit’s due: thank you for fixing this. The complete silence about this issue, followed by a silent fix, has been frustrating though.
