Plex treats different tracks as the same track

Plex Media Server
1

I recorded a video in case my description isn’t helpful.

If you have a song, with the same title, or slightly different title, Plex treats it as the same file.

So for example if you have:

Wait [Mono]
Wait [Stereo]
Wait [1965 Stereo Mix]

It will see them all as the same track, and if you rate one of them 3 stars, it will rate all of them 3 stars. If you have a smart playlist with songs that are 3 stars and haven’t been played in 1 month, it will put all three into that playlist. Once one of those tracks has been played, it will remove all three tracks, because it thinks all three tracks are the same.

This also extended to not just different mixes of a song, but also different versions of a song, such as bonus tracks on special releases.

This is also happening with tracks that are on different albums, as an example, Joel Plaskett recorded his 2001 record Down at the Khyber and then in 2021 rerecorded and released the album * Twenty Years Gone: Joel Plaskett Emergency Revisits Down At The Khyber*. When I rate a song with 3 stars on one of those two albums, that different recording of the same song appears with 3 stars, too.

Here’s the video posted on Google Drive, if you see this right after I post, it may still be processing: Screen Recording 2022-09-06 at 2.28.49 PM.mov - Google Drive

2

This is likely because the underlying data suggests the tracks are the same recording. See the documentation below for more details:

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Recording

If you think the recordings should be distinct entities (by MusicBrainz’ definition), you can edit these and Plex will pick up the correct data.

3

When you say, “you can edit these” do you mean edit it on MusicBrainz or locally?

4

Apologies if I wasn’t clear. I mean to say you can edit it in MusicBrainz. Any changes made there will flow through to Plex’s metadata services (this can sometimes take up to a couple of days), and will be reflected in your library when it next updates metadata.

5

Is there a way to have your music library completely unrelated to MusicBrainz, there’s a lot of decisions there I completely disagree with.

6

Unfortunately there’s no way to disable MusicBrainz data entirely, as it makes up the backbone of the metadata. You can choose to prefer embedded tags though, which may achieve some of what you’re looking for.

7

Yeah it doesn’t. I might have to ditch Plex for music.