My music is all tagged meticulously via Picard. It’s also structured according to Plex rules. Folder structure looks like this:
Album Artist\Album Title\track# - Track title
I happen to also produce music. I have a discogs entry but not musicbrainz, too lazy to care about it plus that was all 20 years ago. Anyway, I’ve got my own music tagged just as properly. Which is fairly minimal and is just simply “Architekt” for album artist and artist for all tracks in the 5 albums I made. The album titles for each album are all the same. I did this via mp3tag and just simply batch set the metadata fields to the same value. I verified this by opening each file and copying the text just to verify there wasn’t any trailing or leading space shenanigans. So for the life of me I can’t figure out why Plex thinks I have create 56 ALBUMS! Attached is a pic of what it looks like. It literally split every single track into its own album but gave it the same album name. Is there a way to like merge these duplicate albums in Plex? I have a few other artists where this happened (again, all tagged via Picard and verified to have the same album artist and same album title fields including no extraneous spaces or unicode characters), but none of them produced anything comparing to the 52 albums I somehow managed to get with my own produced music. Like I said, each individual track is being treated as an album. I’ve also attached 2 images that look identical (cause they are) but are from 2 different tracks. You can even see my cursor indicating no trailing spaces in the album name. Any suggestions for how to merge/fix my newfound voluminous musical history?
Edit: I don’t know if it has any bearing on diagnoses but Emby doesn’t do this, it correctly identifies the right number of albums for me. I’m debating whether to switch given that I’ve just been having so many problems with Plex for music.
Edit 2: I have prefer local metadata enable as well as album art local files only for this library (set it before I imported it). Just to be paranoid, for every agent for artists and albums I put local media at the top.
But I’d rather figure out why it happened. Could you provide a screenshot of your tagging application, showing at least these fields: Album Title, Track Title, Album Artist, Track Artist, Disc Number, Track Number? Not doubting that you’ve done the work of tagging, but a second set of eyes might see things. This How-To talks about a couple of things that might cause problems for Plex.
No worries about doubting me, there’s probably something I’ve missed and would be happy to have it pointed out. The albums I produced myself don’t actually have track/disc numbers. For one, they’re either vinyl releases or, with the exception of 1 CD, net releases. For two, they’re all just one “disc”. So maybe the lack of track and disc number causes an issue? Here it is in mp3tag:
Merge works great btw. Thanks for the detailed screenshot showing me where it was, for some reason I didn’t think to do it that way or look there but makes total sense now.
Edit: I’m looking at the other albums from other artists that have similar issues: They are all my vinyl rips. Which don’t contain track/disc numbers (All the vinyl, at least in the techno world, tends to use the notation A1, A2, B1, B2, etc and not numerical track numbers). So I wonder if it’s an issue with that? Problem is, I don’t know what I’d put in the track fields for vinyl releases that use A and B side nomenclature for track numbering.
I think disc/track numbers may be the issue, especially since it appears that the tracks for all albums are in a single, flat folder. Until recently, having albums in a flat folder, rather than an artist/album/tracks structure, caused major problems for Plex. A recent update fixed that, but only if embedded tags are in really good order.
I’d try adding disc/track numbers to one album that’s currently split up, rescan the library, and see what happens. Might have to Plex Dance.
I’m guessing Plex won’t understand ‘A1’ ‘B1’ track numbers. Try just 1 through 10 (if there are 5 ‘A’ and 5 ‘B’ tracks) as an experiment.
I think I’m misinterpreting your post. I do have my music organized by artist/album/tracks. So for example, for my music (screenshotted above), the structure is this:
Architekt\
Album 1\
Track1
Track2
Track etc...
Album 2\
Track1
Track2
Track etc...
Album 3\
Track1
Track2
Track etc...
I don’t think that’s necessary. Are the album folder names identical to the embedded Album Title tags? That used to be a problem, too. Might still be, I’m not sure.
Yes. What I did was I had all the metadata filled in. Spent 3 days doing it and triple checking. Then I used mp3tag to copy all the files to a new folder formatting it such that everything was created in the format of:
Album Artist\
Album Name\
Track 1
Track etc...
It really seems to just be with anything ripped from vinyl, as I’m going through and merging by hand. I think I’ll just deal with it rather than changing the tags because that would be technically incorrect metadata which would screw me up when it comes to importing my music into my digital turntables.
That might be best. The only thing I can see to try is track numbers, and if that won’t work for your system, it’s not worth it, especially if Merge does the trick.
I was really happy with the merge feature in plex, none of my other music players have allowed this before so i now have deluxe and extended versions of stuff just as i want it, i add it as normal just in folders and then inside plex choose the album in question mark the disc number once i’m happy i merge and wallah, one super deluxe album. after that i can even just edit the display name to highlight that it’s a 2 disc version. works so well.
plex music/amp is actually way better than i expected it to be.
that said my tags are quite meticulously sorted using a combination of “iD3 Tag Editor” and “Tigo Tago” (Windows) so this stage is fairly quick and easy.
One thing I have yet to decide on is how i treat compilations as I like the artist view and a lot of these add a whole pile of artists with one track which is quite a mess.
A Various Artist album, configured as indicated, appears like this. The Album Artist is literally “Various Artists,” and each track shows the artist for that track:
I was thinking somewhere along those lines even considering having the name of the compilation as the artist too, so let’s say it’s the awesome Guardians of The Galaxy soundtrack I could put “Guardians of The Galaxy Awesome Mix” as the artist rather than end up with a huge Various Artists category.
