Strange Results in the "Top Albums" View

[SE2Dev]

Server Version#: 1.32.8.7639
Player Version#: Plexamp 4.9.0, Plex Web (Latest)

In some cases “Most Played in <Month/Year>” may show the wrong album. The affected album(s) are “Holy Diver” by Dio and “Holy Diver Live” by Dio.

I’ve been seeing this particular issue for a number of months, and upon actually looking into my play history via the web dashboard I’m not really sure what’s going on. I only have 1 album affected that I know of (or 2 depending on how you look at it). I originally thought the issue was metadata related, but I’m not really sure anymore.

So for some background, when I originally set up my library a lot of the media files were old MP3s, and I’ve been gradually upgrading them to lossless. The process for this looks something like:

1. Delete the old MP3 files
2. Add the new lossless files
3. Re-scan the library
4. Empty trash

Both affected albums have the same track list (by name), and when they were originally added their ratings where tied together (likely due to an issue with metadata). As a result of this all plays for “Holy Diver”'s tracks would show up as plays for “Holy Diver Live” under the “Most Watched in <>” section of Plexamp. Once I finally got around to upgrading these albums to lossless the metadata issue seemed to have been cleared up and the ratings were no longer shared (all of the actually rated tracks were on the non-live version of the album. The issue with the “Most Watched <>” section was not resolved though.

At this point, I assumed that the plays may have been either been tracked under the wrong album, or that there were actual plays on the live album while my device was muted (The smart playlist I was using at the time was based on track ratings [which were shared for these two albums], and had a tendency to play the live tracks over the regular studio versions). Upon actually checking my play history in the Plex WebUI dashboard, I noticed that I don’t actually have any track plays for “Holy Diver Live” for the month in question. Instead all related track plays were for the studio version of “Holy Diver”, which is I believe is correct.

I suspect that this issue may be due to a number of things:

• The original albums had shared upstream MusicBrainz (or similar) IDs for the tracks on these two albums, which resulted in certain tracking data to be associated to the wrong album
• Plays during this time were rolled up into cached blocks of historic information to prevent querying the database every time a user opens the Plexamp homescreen.
• Replacing the tracks with lossless versions forced Plex to generate entirely new database entries for these tracks and to pull new metadata (which was now correct).
• The cached play history data isn’t recalculated as part of the regular house-keeping process because it is assumed that past track plays aren’t going to be changed.

Is there any way short of manually updating the database that I can fix this? Is there potential for this issue to occur on other albums where the metadata may be changed upstream and re-fetched by Plex?

[SE2Dev]

There appears to be other strange behavior happening in the “Top Albums” section that doesn’t actually seem to be related to the albums or artists specifically mentioned above. The issue mentioned above does still persist for me (independent of the issue mentioned below, but they may be somewhat related).

New Issue:

• “Top Artists” for a given month shows N plays for artist A
• “Top Albums” for the same month lists 4 different albums by artist A all with N plays

Given that this doesn’t really make sense - I would assume that based on this, the “Top Albums” section is generated by doing a reverse-lookup on the track release ids (I believe that’s what they were called in MusicBrainz last time I checked), and finding all albums that those releases fall under which results in inaccurate results (especially if you have duplicate tracks via compilations).

[SE2Dev]

I recently noticed new behavior regarding that the original history issue that I had (where my early plays for the album “Holy Diver” were being treated as plays for “Holy Diver Live”). Upon further investigation, it would seem that the issue of new plays being associated with the wrong album was fixed in mid-2023 for those particular albums. I assume this was the result of a metadata refresh correcting bad information. An interesting side-effect of the original issue, however, is that the affected early-2023 and prior history entries have really weird album association information: tap + holding on one of the borked history entries and selecting “Go to Album” will jump to “Holy Diver Live” but display the title (incorrectly) as “Holy Diver” (the album they should be associated with). I did some additional digging and found that the album title is stored inline with the play history items in the database and believe that during the time where the metadata for these two albums was incorrect. In these affected entries, the inline title was “Holy Diver”, yet the actual track guids referred to tracks from the “Holy Diver Live” album. That would explain the weird album association behavior I was seeing originally.

Ultimately, I don’t think there’s any way for Plex to automatically resolve this. Because the affected history entries seem to be isolated to just these two albums for a specific time period, I was able to manually correct the affected entries by correcting the track guids for these history items.