I have started to notice (after 15+ years and over 1000 albums of editing ID3 tags) that batches of albums by certain original vendors appear to repeat this failure. Due to the quantity of edits I’ve completed, I cannot recall if they were Amazon, Apple Music, 7Digital, etc., or maybe older, discontinued stores (Windows Music, Google Play Music, etc.). However, I recently noticed 3 albums, purchased around the same time, required the use of a secondary OS to get the ID3 tag to be properly recognized in Plex. This likely means they were purchased from the same vendor and could be a clue to their failure to trigger Plex’s auto-scan ‘recognize and refresh’ without an outside OS to edit the file.
So, I’m going to make an educated guess, here, based on these additional details…
- Vendors may be adding an unrecognizable hash in their copy of the files to somehow “ID protect” their product. Most likely, this is a string that can’t be seen in an ID3 tagger, but might be found in some other non-destructive file editors. I’ll keep my eyes open for trends and comment back here when it happens next time.
REMEMBER: I’m strictly commenting on unrecognized ID3 changes in Plex that CANNOT be resolved by carrying out the “Plex Dance”
My Plex Server stats (for those of us geeks):
- Intel Dual Xeon mobo
- 2 Xeon 3150s
- 32GB RAM
- Ubuntu Server 21.04
- Kid3 tagging software
