I had the same issue and finally have a “working” solution with the latest beta (at least for my big library). I previously used Plex Music Scanner and have correct embedded tags/album art for my music. I had to switch to Plex Music after the update to get the date working again. Unfortunately, it seems I have to now go through each album to refresh the metadata to get the correct date to be shown. Refresh all metadata from the Manage Library menu on Music seems to only refresh the artist and NOT the albums. Here are my steps for each of the artists/albums (0-9 and A to Z):
“Unmatch” the Artist (if available)
Add “artist-poster.jpg” if needed and “Refresh Metadata” for the Artist
“Refresh Metadata” for each album by the Artist
This seems to be working so far (tedious though). Any other suggestions are welcome. Fun!
After updating to version number 1.27.0.5897 when I refresh the metadata for an individual artist, the “originally available” date for each album listed under that artist changes to the exact date the album was released. This occurs even though I have chosen to “prefer local metadata” for this library. In most cases this also results in the year of the album appearing correctly for the albums listed under the artist. These albums that now have the full correct dates were formerly listed as xxxx-01-01 under the “Originally Available” section of the album edit screen. Those same albums were formerly listed under the artist with an incorrect date of the year prior to the xxxx year.
This will require me to individually refresh metadata for my 2500 plus artists to reflect the correct release date for each album listed under the album artist. Not that big of a deal given the amount of time I have already invested in my music collection.
I have been using Plex for many years to access just about all of my audio / video content. It is amazing software that allows me to access all of that content from both within and outside my home. In fact, I am listening to music via Plex as I write this response.
That said and although I actually like the idea of having the exact date the album was released, I struggle to understand why the originally available date in the list of albums below the artist, couldn’t have been fixed sooner. I realize that for those of us preferring local metadata Plex creates the xxxx-01-01 date to replace the “year only” date available within the ID tag of our music files. No problem with that, but then Plex chooses to read 2000-01-01 as having occurred in 1999. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I am not a “coder” just a simple-minded software user.
Well now 1.27.1.5916 still same issue… I even added a new album that had never been in my plex before - and same issue…
I am having a hard time understanding why this is so difficult for them to correct… Use to work just fine…
If I refresh meta it shows the previous year, if I just look at old stuff and not refesh meta its fine…
edit: Ok think I found the issue on why was still seeing this, agent was personal media artist vs plex music, changed to plex music and now shows same year.
Still happening for me on 1.27.1.5916. I use Personal Media Artists because Plex Music consistently changes album artists to album artist / another artist if there is a split album between them in the library.
This is really odd… as I upgraded to the beta and then went to the public release this morning and added several albums this morning and did not see the issue. I checked my Library again and it shows I am using Personal Media Artist (as I thought I had that selected). Every new band I add I spot check to make sure I somehow don’t have duplicates and have been checking the dates.
I click on the Band, and then click on the album and edit it and go to info and check the folder date to what Plex is showing and after the beta and public release, it has been correct for me.
I just want to help out where I can to see if I can repo this and get more eyes on it and get it fixed once and for all.
NOTE: For anyone that installed the beta and listens to music… is your play count (hours) being recorded in the dashboard. I think the whole time I had the beta on, it was not recording any hours of music listened too. When I installed the public release, its now showing up.
After updating to today’s release ( 1.27.1.5916 public release), I still can’t reproduce the bug this thread is about. But I still had to roll back to 1.25.9.5721 because of a newly introduced music bug:
It would be very interesting to know why some people are still able to reproduce the album date bug.
Just added 2 tracks from a new 2013 CD I received today.
Metadata for my FLAC and MP3 files have 2013 in the Date field.
After importing, looking at the album in Artist view shows 2012 as the date. Editing the album shows 2013-01-01 as the Originally Available date. Changing Originally Available to 2013-01-02 makes the album show 2013 in Artist view. This is the same behavior I’ve experienced for the last several released versions.
My library settings are:
Scanner: Plex Music Scanner
Agent: Personal Media Artists
Album Sorting: Oldest first
Prefer Local Metadata: True
Also, I don’t know if this is helpful or not, but I added a few tracks from an album that each had different years. I wanted to use the earliest year as the album date in Plex (which didn’t happen when I imported), and in this case I was able to use the YYYY-01-01 date (instead of YYYY-01-02) to make it appear correctly in Artist view. It seems that as long as the date is something different than what was originally imported, it works.
