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.
