Plex splits a single-disc album

[VarHyid]

Plex insists on splitting the single-disc Blu-ray Audio album “Shadowbringers: Final Fantasy XIV Original Soundtrack” into two discs. Nothing helps, I tried the Plex dance, I made sure the disc number tag is empty, then I tried adding “1” to it (to all tracks)… nothing worked.

Even if I use “Unmatch”, it maintains the split. When I pick “Fix match”, I see that there are two almost identical matches - one with 2 discs, one with 1 disc, but even if I pick the one with 1 discs, it doesn’t help.

All tracks are in the same folder, named like this:

• FINAL FANTASY XIV - Shadowbringers Original Soundtrack - 001 - A Land Long Dead (死の大地 ～永久焦土 ザ・バーン～).mka
• FINAL FANTASY XIV - Shadowbringers Original Soundtrack - 002 - Bedlam’s Brink (不穏の淵).mka
• FINAL FANTASY XIV - Shadowbringers Original Soundtrack - 003 - Battle (戦闘シーン ～次元の狭間オメガ：アルファ編～).mka

etc. up to 088. I own 3 other Blu-ray Audio discs with the other soundtracks from the series such as “Stormblood: Final Fantasy Original Soundtrack” or “Heavensward: Final Fantasy Original Soundtrack” - those have no issues, but none of them has any matches that would contain two discs, only “Shadowbringers” does.

What can I do to fix this if even unmatching doesn’t help?

[tom80H]

Given your description I assume you’re not using embedded metadata?

According to MusicBrainz there’s different versions of that release… one of them is indeed a 2-disc album.
https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/4940cc61-5784-497d-8a8b-8ccf4c0c913e

You can fix the match using the Music Brainz ID of the correct release… just tested this myself:

1. Click ⋮ > Fix Match → Search Options
2. Clear the search mask (artist, album, year)
3. Enter 302f7eb2-2e60-4036-8838-fa0f6f2e4479 as the album name (this is the MBID of the 88-track BD release)
4. Verify the agent is set to Plex Music and click Search
5. Pick the release (if your file has embedded metadata, the 1st match will usually be based on that)

[VarHyid]

Nevermind. It was a “keyboard operator error”… kind of. All these tracks were missing data in the “track number” field. Normally, it’s always added automatically by Exact Audio Copy when I rip a CD, but because this is a Blu-ray Audio disc, it has to go through a more manual process and I forgot that part.

Once I added it and also checked off the “Prefer local metadata” option for that library, Plex managed to recognize that it’s a single-disc 88 track release.

Still, thanks a lot for the tip, it may prove useful in the future

[OttoKerner]

@VarHyid

the “Prefer local metadata” option for that library,

If these are still .mka files, Plex won’t read any embedded metadata from them.
Which audio codec is used on this Bluray?
Is it stereo or surround?

[VarHyid]

@OttoKerner

If these are still .mka files, Plex won’t read any embedded metadata from them.

And yet it did. In order to solve this issue, all I had to do is to add the “track number” tag to those .mka files. This is the one thing that made Plex understand that it’s an 88 track album instead of a 2-disc release. How did it do that if it can’t read this data?

BTW, to be clear, I used MP3Tag to do this which I believe adds a “Tags” property to those files instead of modifying the “real” .mka tags so, for example, if I check the tag info on track 6, the “correct” default .mka tag for “track number” still remains 1, but at the bottom is a separate “tags” group with all the details added by MP3Tag incl. track number 6, title etc.

Is it possible that Plex can read those even if they’re in an .mka file? That’s the only explanation I can think of given that adding the track number is what made the change and fixed the problem.

@OttoKerner

Which audio codec is used on this Bluray?
Is it stereo or surround?

Apparently it’s “APCM” and these are stereo tracks, just with a higher sampling rate than what a CD can offer.

[OttoKerner]

@VarHyid

Apparently it’s “APCM” and these are stereo tracks, just with a higher sampling rate than what a CD can offer.

I recommend you to just convert them to flac.
Which makes it possible to embed meta tags which Plex server can actually read and it saves a little bit of storage space too.

You can use eac3to for this.
Here is a little one-liner. Put it into a text file and name it convert_mka_to_flac.bat
All you then need is to download eac3to.exe, place it into a folder of your choosing and adapt the path name to the location of eac3to.exe on your computer.

for %%I in (*.mka) do ("D:\tools\eac3to\eac3to.exe" "%%I" 1:"%%I.flac")

(if the .mka file contains more than one audio stream, change the 1 to the number of the stream you are targeting)

download at eac3to 3.36 / 3.36 with UsEac3to GUI 1.3.3 / 3.39 Mod Free Download - VideoHelp

From then on just copy this .bat file into the folder which contains the .mka files and double-click it.

[VarHyid]

Thanks for the tip

@OttoKerner

Which makes it possible to embed meta tags which Plex server can actually read

So you insist that Plex is unable to read this data in an .mka file? Do you have any explanation to why the addition of this data solved my problem? I wasn’t trying any other things, I was testing this very meticulously to make sure some other change wouldn’t affect the results so how is it technically possible that the tag that’s not being read by Plex allowed Plex to understand the track numbers? I’m just curious. Do you have a theory?

[OttoKerner]

@VarHyid

So you insist that Plex is unable to read this data in an .mka file?

Yes, I am sure of it.

@VarHyid

I was testing this very meticulously to make sure some other change wouldn’t affect the results so how is it technically possible that the tag that’s not being read by Plex allowed Plex to understand the track numbers? I’m just curious. Do you have a theory?

It might have been the act of changing the files, or their names , or their folder structure.

Or perhaps you were performing the Plex Dance “lite” unconsciously.

Or did you at one time disable the preference “prefer local metadata”, which then would have caused plex to prefer its sonic fingerprinting for identification of the album.

[VarHyid]

I haven’t changed the file names or their folder location/structure. I did perform the Plex dance during testing, but it never helped as I did it 5-6 times and it always consistently picked up the wrong 2-disc structure.

The “prefer local metadata” option was always disabled previously in this library, then I enabled it and performed another dance, but it didn’t help either. After each dance, I tried unmatching, manual matching and nothing helped.

Finally, I checked all the tags in MP3Tag again and noticed that the “track number” field was empty so I filled it out for all the files, performed the Plex dance again and this was when Plex finally noticed that this is an 88-track single-disc album. It’s the single change I made that fixed it.

Anyway, right now I made a test by creating a completely new “Music” library that points to a new separate folder which contains the same MKA files. This time the library had the “prefer local metadata” option enabled by default and sure enough, it correctly noticed all 88 track numbers. I removed this folder, re-scanned the data to remove it from Plex, opened MP3Tag and deleted all track numbers from these files, moved the folder back to the library, rescanned it and here are the results:

Plex is now seeing all tracks as track number 1 and sorts them in the wrong order (aplhabeticaly) because it can’t figure out which track is which number.

Once again, just to be 100% sure, I moved the folder somewhere else, rescanned the library to make sure Plex forgets it, opened MP3Tag, re-added all the track numbers, moved the folder back to the library, rescanned it… and now it shows the correct track numbers:

How can you explain this? I make a change in the tags and Plex reflects it… and yet it definitely can’t read those tags?

Final test… again, removing the folder, rescanning the library to forget it. Opening MP3Tag and now I’m going to only change the numbers of some track. I’m going to make 3 tracks number 4. Moving the folder back to the library, rescanning and this is what I see:

Track 1
Track 2
Track 4
Track 4
Track 4
Track 5

etc. How can this happen? Here’s some additional proof showing the data on track 3 which shows as 4 and it’s NOT manually edited in Plex, just to show that I didn’t manually overwrite the metadata and the track number has been pulled from the tag.

Oh and of course I didn’t make any changes to the file names.

BTW, I also tried to change the “Title” tag of one of the tracks and this actually didn’t work so you’re correct when it comes to some of the data, it definitely won’t read the title, but the track number, it does.

[OttoKerner]

@VarHyid

Finally, I checked all the tags in MP3Tag again and noticed that the “track number” field was empty so I filled it out for all the files, performed the Plex dance again and this was when Plex finally noticed that this is an 88-track single-disc album. It’s the single change I made that fixed it.

Ahh, yes. That makes sense. If the track numbers are missing, (or only a few tracks have them,) Plex doesn’t consider the tracks as belonging into a common album.

[OttoKerner]

@VarHyid

Anyway, right now I made a test by creating a completely new “Music” library that points to a new separate folder which contains the same MKA files.

Don’t. Just don’t.
As explained above, Plex cannot read meta tags from Matroska containers, so this is mostly an exercise in futility.

[VarHyid]

@OttoKerner

As explained above, Plex cannot read meta tags from Matroska containers

How do you explain that whenever I changed the track number tags, the changes were reflected in Plex? Did you see the attached screenshot? How do you explain the test where I set 3 tracks all to number 4 and they all got “track 4” in Plex?

[VarHyid]

@OttoKerner

Ahh, yes. That makes sense. If the track numbers are missing, (or only a few tracks have them,) Plex doesn’t consider the tracks as belonging into a common album.

How does Plex know that the track numbers are missing if it cannot read these meta tags?

[OttoKerner]

I don’t have an explanation for you. I only know that it won’t get the results you are hoping for, no matter how often you are trying.

Maybe the used software library for reading meta tags (which is not developed by Plex) already has a partial support for matroska. But this is apparently not enough to use it successfully with Plex.