Advanced Music Library Scan stopped

General Discussions
1

trying to scan in a very large music library. There are about 437,000 music files. In the last 12 hours it has scanned in 129,560 and stopped. The wheels are still spinning but nothing is being added anymore. The files are on a Synology NAS being used as a server. The PLEX server is a Dell server connected to the NAS. Every other library has no problem including the older non-advanced music library.

Is this common with this type of music library? I just recently upgraded to a Plex Pass in order to see what the advantages are for Music libraries. So it is hard to tell since it won’t finish scanning.

2

A Premium library will stop scanning if:
there are a lot of files in a common folder.

You must have a strict folder hierarchy of
Music / Artist / Albums / Tracks

You won’t be able to use a Premium library if you have massive folders full of tracks.
Plex will simply stop scanning.

3

I do have a folder structure like that.
Aplha letter/artist names/albums/tracks
The most songs in any given folder may be 200 or 300 depending on the CD collection that may have that many songs.
How do you define “massive”?

4

I have also had the scanner hang trying to decode corrupted audio files.

Hang such that even when plex is shut down, the scanner process is still active (but hung).

the handful of times that has happened, I was able to see what file it was, either through the logs or via htop.

5

OK, I’ve dug through all the music folders to see where the big collections are. I have three folders of soundtrack or oldies with 577, 636, and 686 respectively. I think those are the largest I have. Are those too big? If so I can break them up I guess. But any guidance on what thresholds are would be helpful.

Also, why does a premium library have this issue whereas a normal (free) library does not?

6

How do I find it in the logs?
Not terribly PLEX log experienced so step by step would be nice.

7

simplest way is

@ https://app.plex.tv/desktop

settings > scroll down the bottom left

  • either console (shows real time log messages)
  • or troubleshooting (where you can download the log files)

from there, once you have a log you will have to view and attempt to interpret what it is doing or trying to do.

obviously you will need a log from where the problem was captured, which is not necessarily simple, if you don’t know when it happened to occur.

8

That is massive in my book.
Plex is trying every possible combination of songs in this folder to find the right album(s) where they were released on. With 200 files this will already take so long that the scanner comes to a grinding halt.

You better use subfolders per disc.
See Organizing Music - Soundtracks and Various Artists (Hit collections) - #2 by OttoKerner

9

and that is a poor assumption on plex’s part.

then the scanner should perhaps do a count of the files before attempting to process them into the same album.

Or you know, it could simply read the ID3 tags if available, then do the most logical thing from there.

ie if there is no album tag, or mixed album tags, then don’t try to force them all into a single album.

10

So an advanced library will choke on something a normal library has no issues with? Does an advanced library REQUIRE that the songs be from a real album somewhere? It can’t look at something and if it can’t find it just list it and go on? How hard would it have been to put a time limit on the search?

11

I have a question. How the HELL do you get something like the new Beatles White Album Super Deluxe Edition to match correctly? I have it sorted Artist/Album/Discs/Tracks and it still vomits all over itself and matches everything wrong. In iTunes it shows White Album (Super Deluxe Edition) with 6 discs.

I know Plex music will handle multi disc albums so that isn’t the issue. Is this simply just the metadata service Plex uses doesn’t have this new version of the album?

12

I have found that compilations and special deditions often require extra care when tagging the files.

You will have to tell Plex to favour your embedded meta tags, instead of data from last.fm or Gracenote.
You do it this way:
Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - last.fm
drag the line ‘Local Media Assets’ into the top position of the list
repeat the same under Settings - Server - Agents - Albums - Plex Premium Music

Edit your music library, go to the ‘Advanced’ tab and put a checkmark into ‘Use embedded meta tags’

  • ‘Album Title’ must be identical in all tracks on all discs of this album. The disc number does not belong into here. ‘Titled discs’ are not possible.
  • ‘Album Artist’ must be identical in all tracks on all discs of this album. (This is not the ‘Track artist’ which can be different for every track)
  • ‘Disc number’ must be existent and contain only a simple number (Don’t try 1/6 or similar)

After checking the above, perform the Plex Dance with the album.
(With music, you can omit step 4 of the dance)

Here are some more tips regarding music

multi-disc albums

handling singles and EP’s

possible ‘side car’ files for music

soundtracks and ‘various artists’

13

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