I’m having an annoying issue where “Popular Tracks” is playing versions of said popular track from live albums and random B-side remixes and alternate takes, etc. It’s not doing a proper exact-match of the track name, nor is it regarding the exact album that track came from (in order to stop pulling from live albums, compilations, radio edits, etc.)
For example, my Pink Floyd ‘popular tracks’ include two copies, one after the other, of Wish You Were Here, Money, Great Gig in the Sky, the first from Delicate Sound of Thunder (live 90s album), the second from the actual studio album. Then it continues happening with the PULSE live version, then the studio album version.
For another random example, my R.E.M. popular tracks page includes four (4) different versions of Losing my Religion at the top, all with different suffixes in the title. The actual normal track entry (that’s #3 in the list) doesn’t even pull it from the studio album, it pulls from a compilation album (alphabetically lower in the list than the title of the studio album).
This also seems to be informing your new smart shuffle… thing, so it’s playing all these random versions too.
This has been talked about for years here. It does suck, and we haven’t hear a word from plex ever since.
A fellow user tipped a way of solving this by manually changing the live albums year to make it earlier from the studio albums. It looks like plex considers the release date of the track to use it on the popular tracks.
I’m far from happy with this workaround, and not to mention that sometimes even this won’t work. But its what we’ve got so far.
Really hope they sort this out soon, simply putting a checkbox on albums so that they won’t appear on the popular tracks.
I’ve been more carefully reloading my music into plex, triple checking tags etc, and we really need a way to manually select popular tracks. Due to having a near complete David Bowie library, Plex seems to think only Ziggy Startdust rates as popular. I’d include it, but not all five slots!
Add in that it’s not using the full 1973-02-01 format to display albums by year, simply lumping all 1973 albums alphabetically by year, this really needs to be addressed. Only work around I can seem to find to get albums to display chronologically is to update the “Sort” filed with the release date, which is incredibly tedious work to do when I’m not remotely done updating my library.
