This has been a problem for as long as I remember. When I edit (eg) a song’s name in its tag locally (I use MusicBee mainly, but it’s an issue regardless of what I’m using), Plex will pick the song name change up successfully (I’ve got all the local assets set up as recommended), but Plex for some reason always puts the song into its own album, so I’ll have duplicates of the album, one with the single track in it, the other with all the other tracks (and the newly-edited one missing). Any idea why this is happening?
Can you show an overview of the album’s meta tags?
Do your files have ‘Album Artist’ meta tags in them? If not, try add them (all files of one album need to have identical content in the AlbumArtist tags)
Ya, everything it tagged identically - same album artist and artist. I went in and changed something in the comment field, and boom, it creates a second album with the single track in it that I edited. Nothing else about the file changed, just the comment field.
No, there wasn’t a scan in progress. I can recreate this any time. I went and changed the comment field in one file in MusicBee. Here’s the XML info for two tracks - the first is an untouched track, the second is the edited track:
The problem is back again. I’ve refreshed metadata for the artist many times, and still have duplicates of a number of albums I have just edited. I’ve confirmed that the Album Artist is identical across all (via both MP3Tag and MusicBee).
Verify that “AlbumTitle” is identically tagged in all files
and that “track number” is also tagged in all files.
“Disc number” must either be absent/empty or identically populated.
Yes, Prefer Local Metadata is checked. Took a few tries to get Plex to “forget” the tracks when I removed them, but eventually managed, and the Plex Dance seems to have worked. Am I going to have to do this every time I edit an ID3 tag? Why oh why is this so complicated! With local metadata preferred, I don’t see why Plex can’t just take things as they exist on the hard drive.
The comment field isn’t even read by Plex. So you must not do anything after editing it in one of your files.
Normally, Refreshing Metadata is supposed to be sufficient for Plex to pick up new content from those tags which it does read.
However, if a part of your library is still matched to last.fm or Gracenote (the old “Plex premium music”), then some weirdness can occur from time to time.
This should not occur anymore, after every item has been transferred over to the new agent.
FWIW, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a comment field, a track number, or a song title that I change - the issue occurs regardless. But you raise a good point. This is a library I’ve had for years, and has probably 30k tracks in it. It was definitely set up in the old Plex Premium world. Is it possible that there’s just a bunch of legacy issues with that, and I’m going to have to (gulp) do the full plex dance on my entire collection?
