Different Treatment of Flac And Wav Files

TLDR; moving a live album, an unknown to MusicBrainz album, from wav to flac format causes Plex’s scanner to move the album from the band’s folder to the “Various Artists” folder.

Almost 20 years ago, I attended a live concert and learned that I could go to the band’s web page and buy a copy of that night’s performance. I did so and received three ISO images that possessed that night’s associated wav files.

Plex would not shows this set of wav files in my music library, so I investigated as to why and found that the raw wav files possessed no tag information nor where they named as Plex wants them named.

Consequently, I added all the relevant tags, renamed the files to be as Plex wants them. My initial work was to mark the tracks as part of 3 disc set and mark each track with their respective disc number. This caused “display” issues when examining the album via a web browser. Two problems were seen, all track 1s, 2s, 3s, etc. were bunched together, as if disc number was ignored, and the left hand side of track’s line would overwrite itself.

I wound up tagging all tracks as disc 1 of a 1 disc set and numbered the tracks with unique track numbers.

Plex’s scan now finds, and displays, the files as expected….. until I “flac”ed each file and removed the source wav files. When the files are flaced, Plex, for some reason, loses the music’s band association and moves the album to the “Various Artists” category.

If I return the files back to the wav format (and clearing the associated flac files), then a Plex scan associates them once again with the band.

Why is Plex treating those two set of audio files differently?