Plex Splitting Albums - Each Song is Becoming its Own Album

[PBruno1926]

Server Version#: 1.18.7.2457
Player Version#: 2.14 (14373)

I have been having a peculiar issue with my Plex server. I was attempting to add music to an existing album and an existing artist. I have official and fan created music for the video game series, Metroid. I tried to add a couple of songs to an album I already had. I know that the folder structure and tags were correct because I use this same iTunes library on my Mac and when the songs were copied over to my iPhone the albums and songs are all grouped correctly.

But just to be on the safe side when I copied these new songs to my Plex server, I checked MP3tag and I confirmed that all of the important tags were correct (Artist, Album title, Album Artist, Release year) and they matched up with the songs that were already there. When I scanned the library files, Plex split the new songs into their own album and I was surprised that that happened. I am aware of the Plex dance and performed this with the entire artist thinking it would fix the issue. When the dance was completed Plex split every song of all of the albums that were all previously correct into their own albums for the entire artist, shown below.

My music is all tagged correctly, the folder structure is Music\Metroid (Artist Folder)(AlbumName)\Songs.mp3, shown below in the MP3tag screenshot.

Here is a screenshot of one particular album in MP3tag:

All of the other affected albums look like this too. All of the tags match and each album has its own sub folder.

I have found several forum posts with similar issues but to no avail. I have played with Plex enough on my own to learn some of the weird things it does with music, like when the album artist is not correct. But I am completely stumped on this one. I tried fixing this by turning on and off the “Prefer Local Metadata” option found here:

Music Albums Splitting into Multiple

Server Version#: 4.8.4 Plex is splitting a lot of my albums into 2 with the same album name. Some of the songs are “Untitled”. My library is a mess, making Plex unusable as a music server. Example: for my Norah Jones “Day Breaks” album I show 2 albums named “Day Breaks” where a few of the songs are in one of the copies and the rest of the songs are in the other. All of my music is FLAC format and properly tagged using JRiver Media Center. File structure is Album Artist/Album/Track#. Name I h…

Neither option fixed the issue.

I looked at the agent settings for Artists and Albums and I tried changing my preferred agents and this did not fix the issue. Currently the agents I have set for Artists and Albums is Personal Media Artists and Personal Media Albums respectively. I don’t think this should make a difference as I have this artist not matched to any metadata. Any help would be greatly appreciated as this has been broken for several months now and I spent a lot of hours on trying to fix it but have come up short. Please let me know if you need anything else from me, server logs, more screenshots, etc…

Thank you,
Paul

[beckfield]

I don’t know if this will make a difference, but the one unusual thing I see in your tags is no track number. You might give that a try.

[PBruno1926]

What would you know, that was the problem and fix! These songs previously did not have track numbers and there was never a problem, Plex would always assign the song a zero for the track number. I guess there was some update to PMS that now requires track numbers. Thank you for the advice, greatly appreciate it!

[beckfield]

They did a major overhaul of the music scanning agent several months ago. It’s a lot more accurate than it was, and eliminated the need for the “Plex Dance,” (in music libraries) which was a workaround for a range of issues. But better accuracy in processing tags came with more dependence on complete and accurate tagging, so yeah, track numbers are apparently more important now.

Anyway, glad it did the trick.