Ratings bug for multi-disc albums

Dev Community Dev/API Corner
,
1

Hi,

I believe I have discovered a bug in Plex Media Server.

When setting the rating for any track in a multi-disc album, the rating is incorrectly set for every track that has the same track number, across all discs.

Prerequisites:

  • You need a multi-disc album. In this example I use a 4-disc album

Steps to reproduce:

  • Set a rating of 3 stars for disc 1, track 2

Expected result:

  • Disc 1 track 2 is set to 3 stars

Actual result:

  • Disc 1 track 2 is set to 3 stars
  • Also, disc 2 track 2, disc 3 track 2, and disc 4 track 2 are all set to 3 stars. This is unexpected and not desired

Reproducibility:

  • Some albums in my Plex library are affected, and some are not.
  • For affected albums, this is reproducible always.
  • For non-affected albums, this is reproducible never.
  • I have so far not been able to figure out why some albums are affected and some not.
  • The date added does not seem to make any difference. (Some older albums are not affected, some newer ones are; and vice versa)

I believe the bug is on the server side because it seems to happen regardless of which Plex client you are using. I have observed it in the following:

  • app.plex.tv web app (after setting the rating, a full page refresh is required to observe the bug)
  • PlexAmp on macOS
  • Manual HTTP requests via cURL and RapidAPI
  • My custom, unreleased app that uses the Plex HTTP API

In the latter two cases, I have ensured that I am making a request to PUT /:/rate using the correct ratingKey for the track I want (as explained here). However, if I refresh the track data immediately afterwards using GET /library/metadata/<album ratingKey>/children, I can observe in the returned XML data that the additional tracks contain the erroneous new userRating data, even though they have completely different ratingKeys than the one I specified in my PUT.

This occurs on the latest version for Synology DSM: PlexMediaServer-1.41.9.9961-46083195d-x86_64_DSM72.spk

Please let me know if there is somewhere else I should report this, besides this forum.

1 Like
2

I can see now that there are other topics related to this, going back several years. Reading through them, the gist of it seems to be that it may be related to naming conventions (not in my case, as they all follow the same pattern), or metadata agents.

In my case, I am using “Personal Media Artists” because I find the external agents unhelpful in that they often supply incorrect and unwanted metadata, and I would prefer to use the in-file metadata that I have carefully curated. But after reading those threads, I am getting the sense that star ratings cannot be expected to work properly under such circumstances.

I will consider the matter resolved, as I think I have taken it as far as I can at this point, and based on staff responses in the other threads, the situation seems unlikely to change on the Plex side. If there is anything else I can do that would be helpful, let me know.

1 Like
3

It would appear to be associated with your file names and tags.

Use Mp3Tag or similar to set the Disc # tag for all tracks on a Disc and then Refresh Metadata for the multi-disc album. Then set the rating in Plex for the track/s you want.

Ratings work as desired with my ABBA - Gold - 40 Anniversary Edition (3 Discs), not that I normally use ratings at all.