Server Version#: 1.18.0.1944
Player Version#: Web 4.8.4
I’ve noticed that PLEX will treat the same song on multiple albums the same for things like play count and star ratings. They seem to be linked somehow. For example, you might have a Greatest Hits album for an artist, and when you put star ratings on the individual songs, they will also be input on the individual tracks on the other albums automatically. This has created duplicates in my smart playlists, where I want all tracks greater than 3 stars, it will add the same song from the album and the greatest hits…so it duplicates the song. I also noticed that the play count is also duplicated. Is this how the system is suppose to work? Is there a way to keep them as separate songs? Or is it best to delete the greatest hits albums from my library?
Any help appreciated…
I never noticed the problem that @MP86 is having until he pointed it out. Sure enough, it’s exactly what happens.
I kinda doubt that enabling or disabling metadata, or any amount of Plex Dancing is gonna fix the problem that the ratings are applied to all songs of the same name. They’re likely to return as soon as the album(s) is re-added.and a track is re-rated
This is likely a bug. I just tried adding a rating to one song from the original album, and sure enough the “greatest hits” album with the same track inherited that rating. Neither had a rating before.
Thanks @leelynds, good to know it is not just my setup. I also think it is a bug, and probably a side effect of the way PLEX sorts/links songs for radio. For now I’ve decided just to delete my ‘Greatest Hits’ type of albums to avoid duplicates…luckily I don’t have many.
Also, thank you @trumpy81 for the suggestions too…
I noticed this same issue when having singles with b-sides. If I’d rated a track off an album and had the single of that same track it had applied the rating to both which is very annoying.
Hopefully this will be fixed, as currently I can’t rate those tracks because of the issue.
Recently, I too have been experiencing an issue with track rating duplication, though initially did not. A few weeks ago I began adding remastered versions of existing music tracks. The tracks are identical except for the file name and ID3 track name which is suffixed with “(Remastered)”. After adding the track, PLEX discovers it correctly but creates a duplicate album. Afterwards I merge the duplicate albums and change my 5-star track rating from the original track to the remastered track for my smart playlists. This workflow and subsequent track rating has been working fine up until yesterday. Now all new remastered tracks duplicate the track rating of the original. I checked the previously added tracks and they are still okay so it appears to be affecting only new tracks. I did perform a little experiment to see if it was a problem with the file name or ID3 tag. I removed a remastered track added last week and was working as expected, emptied trash, then added it back. Sure enough, it is now replicating track ratings. I have not changed any server settings and am at the latest version of PMS. When I first discovered this problem I thought I would just split the merged albums (though I cannot find out how to do that yet) and live with duplicate albums. But, apparently this will still not correct the track rating issue.
I think we need to split up albums, singles and compilations. That way adding a rating to an album track shouldn’t effect the same named track in a compilation or single. Currently I’m getting multiple tracks in my smart playlist from rating an album track because I have a few singles too.
I’d also like to know if there are any progress on this issue. I’m running the latest version of the server (1.18.7.2457) on macOS, and beginning to get annoyed at how the song rating is working, in terms of how it is shared between multiple instances of songs, when used with Smart Playlists.
Below is an image of an example playlist I made, where there are three instances of the same song, despite only rating one of them, because the rating is shared between them. Just below is the song “Final Call”, which there is only one instance of, despite having two instances of the song in the library. So the feature is not even entirely consistent with how it was supposed to work it seems.
Any movement on this? Surely it’s an easy fix. As long as track rating is related to just the album you’re meant to be adding it to I’d be happy.
I’ve just got instances of when I’ve got the original album and the remastered version and when I rate a track on the original is also rates the remaster. It seem like a small bug right?
Sorry I don’t have a fix, but I will say that you’re not the only one that has been experiencing this. My OCD skyrockets everytime I see duplicates in my smart playlists due to having any type of reissue or greatest hits in my collections.
The Plex team needs to rework this altogether. The functionality is convoluted and dated.
I can confirm I have the same problem (if this is the same as described above by others). I use discs as years. Eg: Disc 2020 etc…
The problem appears to be happening when 2 conditions are met:
-Using only “Personal Media Albums Artists” agent.
-When you switch from “Auto Match” to “Personal Media Artists” under album Match section.
This “feature” makes no sense for song ratings. There are so many reasons why people like to rate the “same song” differently:
Bitrate/sound quality of the underlying file. Better quality - higher rating. Or worse sound quality / older recording with higher rating, nostalgically.
Remastered, live, accoustic, instrumental, remix song versions etc. are not the same songs. But who knows whether Plex treats them as the same or not
Mark duplicated songs implicitly through rating (e.g. 1 star), to have songs in (smart) playlists based on ratings only once in the playlist. I apply this strategy for years to my music library.
The matching is opaque. Most of the same songs aren’t recognized. The ones that are matched, cannot be listed. And it seems like it sometimes matches totally different tracks. At least when I listen to my smart playlist of unrated songs, eventually there’ll be songs that already have a rating. Even though I am very sure that song or similar songs didn’t come up earlies. AND looking through my library I’ve noticed a lot of songs I really like having such a bad rating I cannot believe I should have applied them. Probably I’ve listened to the good recording first and then to the bad, gave them a bad rating and thanks to this very nice feature, the good song was rated bad, too. Which results into that I’ll never listening to this song again, accidentally.
I’ve already spent about 100 hours to rate my songs. Basically, I could start again now, after this issue has been fixed. To correct these rating errors.
The funny thing about this is I’ve moved to Plex after making my own experiences with QNAP Music. I’ve rated my songs for about another 100 hours. And one day, after an update, the NAS just thrown away each rating, without any built in backup. And now Plex puts the spoke into my wheel. Luckily, I’ve also save song ratings directly into the files with the good old Windows Media Player…
Plex’s logic makes a certain amount of sense from the Plexamp perspective - duplicate tracks don’t cause as much of a nightmare from a mood or style type experience. However, if you just want to listen to a smart playlist of songs rated higher than three stars, and you have a bunch of compilations or singles, the nightmare begins. The only work arounds I’ve found are:
Add a new “Mood” tag to specify the specific dupe tracks you want excluded and add that exclusion to the smart playlist; or
Unmatch the album with the duplicates you don’t want to listen to (but thereby sacrifice the Plex Music metadata experience.)
Thank you for the hint. I’ll apply this strategy of using mood for duplicates. As it can be used in (smart) playlists and them can be exported through external tools, I can also map that information to other media players.
It’s also a better strategy than rating duplicates with 1 star, because it’s not the duplicated songs fault to be a duplicate. And songs will have there “true” rating also in e.g. best of albums and so on.
However it doesn’t solve the issue of getting to know which songs plex treats as the same. I have 15k songs. The only option I know of would be:
repeat: (1) save all ratings of the songs. (2) change the rating of 1 song (3) compare the rating of all other 14.999 songs with their previous rating (4) go to repeat… so just about 225 million operations
Honestly, I don’t even want to know which songs plex treats as the same. It just shouldn’t in terms of song ratings
I truly don’t understand how this can be happening. Each song/item in the Plex database has its own unique ID. How is the track rating not tied to the specific ID rather than the title of the song? It seems you would have to go out of your way to create such a huge organizational gap in the application. I have many smart playlists that look at the rating, play count, and last skip dates to build the song list. Without the ability to individually rate songs and/or add them to smart playlists, the ratings and smart playlists lose a lot of their utility. I really hope that they either fix this behavior or provide some method of working around it that doesn’t involve the massive amount of work that adding and removing a bunch of mood tags would.
If I’m reading the logs correctly Plex is even running Musicbrainz acoustic id’s on all the tracks. So all this overhead to create unique IDs for each song but then the star ratings only apply loosely to song titles?? It’s just mind boggling.
