Dear all,
I have several albums in both mp3 and FLAC format, eg. as FLAC for local playback on my stereo and as mp3 for remote playback for my mobile devices (I know that there is a basic possibility of transcoding but I used to rip my CD in both formats long ago and do not want to delete the files).
I separated those albums by appending [FLAC] to the album tag in the metadata. All other media libraries (SONOS etc.) show two different albums of the same artists (e.g. U2 - War and U2 - War [FLAC]), which is exactly what I intended. Strangely, the Plex music library only does so for certain albums, but not for all; sometimes, it shows only one album with every track twice (the mp3 version and the FLAC version), disregarding the [FLAC] appendix.
Does anybody have an idea, how the albums show be tagged/organized to ensure that the Plex Music Server has two separate entries for the FLAC and the non-FLAC album?
Your thoughts are highly appreciated.
Cheers, AMB
I was hoping you’d get a response, but seeing none here’s what I’ve been doing. I do this as I’ve discovered nothing better.
First, all mp3’s go into iTunes and I use the iTunes channel, or iTunes directly, to listen.
My flacs are mainly multi channel so I have a separate library for each variation. “Music 5.1” “Music 4.0” and “Music 2.0”.
In a few cases I have multiple versions of a album so I have to change the titles not only so Plex sees it but also so I can find the version I’m looking for.
Hope that’s of any help.
Thanks for your comment. Unfortunately, I have high quality rips only for some, but not for every album - that is the reason why I would like to avoid a separate FLAC library, since I would have to look first into the FLAC library, realizing that the album I was looking is not available there and then use the regular music library… I know, these are first-world-problems, but that is what Plex is made for, isn’t it?
I think I partly made progress: it seems that Plex Music Server recognizes a FLAC album as a separate album more robust if it is in a separate (sub-)folder. I might be willing to move all .flac files into a subfolder of the album folder, if this helps reliably. However, refreshing/updating the library is not sufficient to recognize it as a separate album, but deleting and re-adding it did the trick (at least for one album). But there must be a reason, why some albums are recognized correctly and some not…
I may be a little late to the party, but here’s my approach.
I append the [FLAC] to the AlbumArtist field, keeping Artist field normal.
I use JRiver as my primary music manager, and configured it to structure my files with AlbumArtist as the top level directory
As you can see, I have directories for an artist, plus any alternative formats, in my case, mainly FLAC.
This pulls into PLEX in an OK, manor. They are separate, but unfortunate I don’t get any match data
As you can see, all the FLAC entries aren’t tagged up nicely.
Though I feel this is one step closer to my ideal.
