Server Version#: 1.18.2.2058
Player Version#: 4.8.4
This is a problem I’ve been having with recent Plex server versions for perhaps the past three months. Previously, I’ve not had this issue for at least a year and Plex used to do this correctly, but does not anymore.
I’m a musician and I use Plex server to organize rehearsal recordings. The recordings are placed onto the Plex server using a script that organizes them as artist/album/song title, using not just the file name to establish this but also identically matching ID3 tags within the files. The files are simple date / timestamp names that correspond to when they were made in the rehearsal room.
An example of some directory listings (just a few directories/files shown; in reality, there are hundreds) looks like:
[classic@zotac wooly]$ ls MyBand\ 2019/2019-11*
‘MyBand 2019/2019-11-28’:
‘2019-11-28 10:12:39.mp3’ ‘2019-11-28 10:21:20.mp3’ ‘2019-11-28 10:29:39.mp3’
‘MyBand 2019/2019-11-30’:
‘2019-11-30 12:24:47.mp3’ ‘2019-11-30 12:30:08.mp3’ ‘2019-11-30 12:38:00.mp3’ ‘2019-11-30 17:53:44.mp3’ ‘2019-11-30 17:57:45.mp3’
The files then have ID3 tags that match artist/album/track identically, shown here using ffprobe to illustrate:
[classic@zotac wooly] IFS=’\n’; for file in find MyBand\ 2019/2019-11-30 -type f; do echo “FILENAME: $file”; ffprobe “$file” 2>&1 | grep -e"artist |album |title " ; done
FILENAME: MyBand 2019/2019-11-30/2019-11-30 18:02:13.mp3
artist : MyBand 2019
album : 2019-11-30
title : 18:02:13
FILENAME: MyBand 2019/2019-11-30/2019-11-30 12:24:47.mp3
artist : MyBand 2019
album : 2019-11-30
title : 12:24:47
FILENAME: MyBand 2019/2019-11-30/2019-11-30 12:30:08.mp3
artist : MyBand 2019
album : 2019-11-30
title : 12:30:08
... etc
What is now happening is that where previously there would be a single album in the display called “2019-11-30”, there are now many albums called “2019-11-30”, often there is a distinct album for each individual track with just that track inside of it.
Part of why Plex is confused is because these tracks are placed on the server as they are created, and as such, new tracks continue to appear over the course of minutes or hours. Once an album is present, if new tracks are added even a minute later, Plex no longer wants to add these matching tracks to the existing album, and instead starts creating new albums for each track.
There is no basis for Plex to make this decision, which for about a year or so wasn’t happening, and for months I have tried every combination of flags, tried different naming conventions, tried to work with the datestamp of the files themselves to some extent, and while Plex will group the albums correctly if you point it to a new set of files from scratch, with the additive model it no longer works. This seems like a straight up bug; the directory structure, the names, and the ID3 tags all point to a single album and Plex does not need to be guessing these might be different.
