I created a smart playlist of my top 150 played songs. I noticed that a lot of the tracks on the playlist had been duplicated. After further investigation I noticed that if a track was on 2 or 3 albums it would show up on the playlist 2 or 3 times from each album.
Investigating further it looks like the play count is being recored on every track with the same name!
So lets look at an example. The track “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” by Mark Ronson. I have that track on two albums,
Nothing Breaks Like a Heart (Single)
NOW That’s What I Call Music! 102
I started playing the Nothing Breaks Like a Heart (Single) version at 11:57 on the 22nd March 2020. See play history screenshot below
But checking the play history of the track on the NOW That’s What I Call Music! 102 (this track wasn’t played and is a different file) It has also record as being played at the same time!
So, after many hours of trouble shooting i think I have found the issue. It seems that its recoding a play for all songs that have the same MusicBrain. So the example i used in my first post, if the tracks have the same AcoustID then Plex will duplicate the track play.
So most people have situations where the same track recording will appear on a few different albums.
Can someone from Plex comment on this and let me know if this is a deal breaker to fix?
As this thread has had no replies, i will be bumping it every day until it does.
23 days later, still no help. I have invested over 9 years in to Plex as this point, this issue is ruining all that. I’m going to start looking for other solutions as the error is getting worse with every passing day.
Plex identifies tracks based on MusicBrainz data. So, if the same track recording appears on multiple albums, then it’s identified as the same track and Plex will count it as such. Different recordings (e.g. a live concert vs a studio recording) of the same artists’s song will be identified as different and tracked separately.
But if the same actual recording is used on multiple albums, then it’s expected and intentional that they’ll be identified the same in Plex and thus a playback of the recording on one album is the same as the playback of that same recording on a different album. That also extends to track data like user ratings. So, basically, this is working as intended.
I see how this is intentional in terms of cataloging the music, counting plays and sharing ratings, and personally, the shared play counter or rating isn’t the issue here either. The issue lies in the way Plex adds all copies of the same recording to the smart playlist, even though it really would make sense to just have one copy, since it is after all the same recording, if you get what I mean?
@chrisc Thank you for clarifying how the server acts today. But i completely agree with @YoonAddicting1. The part that is driving me mad is smart playlists and duplication. For example, i have a top 25 most played music playlist. That has one song 4 times. Once from the real album, once from a greatest hits, and from 2 Now That’s What I call Music albums.
The only way i can see to stop this is to change to use just embedded tags or never have any song more that once.
@chrisc are you able to share any best practices for this issue from your support team?
I’ve filed an issue internally for discussion about this. Early comments are generally in favor of improving the playlist smarts to “de-duplicate” this in some manner. That said, I have no information about when (or, technically, if) any such change might get released. We’ve got tons of other work across Plex all already in progress.
