Album art disappears randomly

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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21

Interesting. Good to know I’m not the only one. I can and will definitely help in any way I can to help resolve this as well. I’m not really sure what else to investigate to narrow down the cause of this. At this point I’m leaning towards it being a bug in Plex. I’m just not sure why it only affects certain files.

Is it always the same files/albums for you? What types of files do you have? What image format is your artwork? For me, almost all of my library is variable bitrate (v0) or 320Kbps mp3s with embedded artwork in .jpg format. Tried moving the artwork to a cover.jpg sidecar file; that did not make a difference unfortunately. I noticed this issue about the same time (6-9 months ago) as you too.

Here are the key points that I’ve discovered so far:

  • Cover art disappears on the same albums after approx. 3-5 days.
  • Prefer Local Metadata is on
  • Can refresh metadata on the album and it will return, however will disappear again in approx. 3-5 days.
  • Embedded or sidecar art makes no difference.
  • Image resolution makes no difference. Have not tried .png format though (not sure if it’s supported).
  • Album is matched in Plex
  • Reinstalling Plex and/or recreating a library does not fix it.
  • Issue is present on MacOS, Linux and Synology NAS.
  • First noticed about 6-9 months ago.

I think at this point we need to get it front of a Plex employee. Maybe @tom80H can help with that.

22

Great summary

I have a potential breakthrough to report (at least for my case) – this thread prompted me to try a different approach and so far so good, although the real test will be if my cover art has not disappeared in the next 3-5 days. I will describe that below but first some additional data points and answers to your questions (in case my fix does not hold)

  • I’ve seen the problem with mp3, Flac, and ALAC files. I primarily use ALAC
  • My issue isn’t so much around the 3-5 days, there was always some missing cover art on my external devices (iOS, Apple TV) even after I refreshed the metadata and therefore had “fixed” it temporarily on the web app. Generally the next day the web app would be missing the same cover art again and iOS and Apple TV also continued to be missing the art.
  • It was about 10% of my albums affected, but it seemed to vary which of the 10% were missing on any given day and app – strange!
  • I’ve seen the problem with all kinds of resolutions
  • I tried the folder.jpg approach
  • I have two servers under my account, both Synology FWIW
  • In my case, I just want to see my embedded cover art, I want zero assistance from external sources for my cover art. In fact, if my cover art is missing I want it to be blank so I’m alerted to fix it. I’m not sure if your problem is the same in that regard.
  • I use the same files with JRiver, FiiO X5 player, and my car USB audio system – all of them render my cover art with no problem. This issue is completely unique to Plex

So regarding a potential fix, at this moment I’m encouraged I may have resolved the problem because for the first time since this started I have the correct (my) cover art on all apps with nothing missing (web, iOS, Apple TV) and the cover art continued to be correct this am after last night’s daily processing. Fingers crossed that this lasts for the next 3-5 days too.

Here’s what I did:

  • This thread prompted me to explore the matching. When this all started I had done some manual matching thinking that would solve the problem. I suspect that the manual matching created the problem alongside me changing lots of settings (agents, scanners, etc… during this era of confused wild goose chasing), so long story short I just unmatched every album that was problematic (about 10% of my albums, took me about an hour). But before I unmatched all the problematic albums, I made sure I had my settings as correct as I knew possible for my case and I cleared my caches.

My steps:

(1). I first ensured that my server is set for the album agent to first select “Local Media Assets” for albums – this sounds the same to me as “Personal Media Albums” (IMHO terrible naming convention by Plex there). But “Local Media Assets” has to be first.
(2) For each library I ensured that “Prefer Local Metadata” was ON, I used “Plex Music” for Genre, Scanner, and Agent. I read that “Plex Music Scanner” is old code and potentially problematic (again, terrible naming convention here – how about v1 and v2 instead?). and for Album Art I set “Local Files Only”. I had changed these settings several times over the last few months since they all sound the same, and had done the refresh all metadata, each time it would seem to fix the problem but then later they would go blank again.
(3) I deleted these directories to “clear the cache”:

/Plex/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plugin Support/Caches
/Plex/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plugin Support/Metadata Combination

I didn’t know what Metadata Combination was but I thought it might be related and I gave it shot to delete it.

(4). Then for each album that was missing cover art on my iOS I did an “unmatch” – miraculously and immediately the right cover art appeared on the web app (if it was not there) and my iOS app where it was missing. Checking my Apple TV later I confirmed that all these unmatches fixed the problem there too.

It is unclear to me whether deleting either of the caches was necessary. This just happened to be the sequence that I did so I thought I would be thorough and document it.

I’m not sure if the problem will appear again within the next 3-5 days, either way I will let you know.

I’m also not sure that my issue is exactly the same as yours since maybe you have a reason to be matching – in my case, I just want to use 100% of my own cover art and metadata on the files.

Good luck!

1 Like
23

Wow, interesting. Nice write-up! I have my PMS set up the same way… I have “Local Media Assets” at the top for albums, I have “Prefer Local Metadata” enabled and am using “Plex Music” for genre, scanner and agent. I had Album Art set to “Both Plex Music and Local Files” but just changed that to “Local Files Only”. I wonder if that was maybe the problem (right now it is rescanning my whole music library, so I’ll check to see if that does anything). It technically shouldn’t have been because I read that if local cover art is present, it’s supposed to use that first (and I have local cover art for 100% of my files). See below quote from the support wiki.

Both Plex Music and Local Files : (Default) Artwork can come from both from our music matching as well as from embedded or sidecar artwork files. Artwork from our music matching will be preferred, unless you also have the Prefer local metadata (see above) preference enabled (in which case, local artwork will be preferred).

I will look into what you did for caching and unmatching when I get home. I actually did not have that problem where you said that cover art wouldn’t show up on the iOS or Apple TV apps. If I did a Refresh Metadata and it showed up on Plex Web, I could get all my other aps (like iOS, Roku, Plex MacOS, etc.) to show up… I just had to close them down and reopen and that would kick-off a refresh (I think they may have local caching on-device there as well). I might try it just for the heck of it.

Definitely report back if that fixed it for you, I will certainly do the same!

24

Did you see this support article:

It mentions restarting PMS after clearing the caches. Did you do that?

25

Well I just tried the same thing as you. I matched my settings to yours, deleted my caches and unmatched my 6 problematic albums. Here goes nothing!

Edit: Another thing I noticed is that by unmatching you won’t get an automatic album description (which you could always add manually) but you also won’t get lyrics either.

26

I did not restart PMS after deleting the caches, thanks for that article.

I wonder if we can rematch the problem albums later? Before I try to rematch I want to see if the problem has gone away in terms of the cover art for the full 5 days, still so far so good for me.

After 5 days I will try to rematch those albums that I unmatched because I do like the lyric feature.

I’m wondering if we both had albums matched to something that no longer existed in the cache or wherever???

I’m suspecting that some sequence of my wild goose chase on this of trying different settings and refreshing just got things into a confused state — how I got there in the first place is unclear to me and was a long time ago, and I was not alarmed at the time. I would just refresh metadata a bunch and eventually things got worse and eventually I noticed a major issue that I could not fix. I kept thinking it was a Plex bug that was going to be fixed in an update but to no avail.

At least that’s my working theory, I’m still not sure if clearing the cache was necessary but certainly didn’t hurt in my case.

27

I’m also avoiding “refresh metadata” for the 5 days. I did not do a refresh after the unmatching.

Do you know if the refresh will rematch as well?

I’m hopeful that after the 5 days I can do a single refresh which will rematch all the albums I fixed.

28

Looks like if you do a “Refresh Metadata” it does in fact match it.

Also, I’ve been using Plex Web as the main way to check if they disappear or not. I think some of the other clients (like the Plex Mac app for example) do some caching so they sometimes will show the album art when all others may not. Plex Web always seems to be correct (at least in my observations).

29

I’ve noticed something that I hadn’t before. I think I may have figured something out. I’ve found that in each case of my problematic albums, there is another album with a similar name. Here they are…

311 - Voyager
311 - Voyager Instrumentals

Deadbeat - Walls & Dimensions
Deadbeat - Walls & Dimensions Instrumentals

Lady Gaga - The Fame
Lady Gaga - The Fame Monster

Sublime - Sublime
Sublime - Sublime (10th Anniversary Edition)

I hadn’t noticed it because in some cases both albums didn’t have missing art; only one of them did, so I wasn’t paying attention to any album that was Ok and that mislead me. Do any of your problematic ones have similar names to another album?

I noticed that when messing around with matching, that in one case there was no match for one of the Instrumental albums. In another, when the album is matched, the year is incorrect. When I unmatch it is is correct. So I think the data in the online database is wrong (my metadata is right, I checked) and Plex is getting confused. I think that in each of these cases Plex is getting confused with the matching and bugs out. I am unmatching all of them and we’ll see what happens later.

30

Day 3 still good here

Absolutely yes regarding duplicates, I should have mentioned that, in almost all cases I had a “close” duplicate. I rip vinyl so I often do the same album multiple times, using different phono preamp or other equipment change. The name of my album is different and the track times are different since I slice tracks manually. But the artist is the same, number of tracks the same, and embedded cover art is the same.

In fact, this jogs my memory on something. I recall the problem became worse after I deleted a directory , scanned the library and then reloaded the same directory in an effort to get Plex to re-load those albums correctly. It may be another data point that this further confused the matching. In those cases the album names where the same as what was deleted. I’m recalling this vaguely, is it possible you did something similar ? Removed some albums that these were matched to?

31

I don’t think I ever did anything like that. I’d venture to say it probably has something to do with more than one album trying to get matched to the same online listing and it just doesn’t like that.

What I ended up doing was unmatched them all, refresh metadata on them, and unmatch again. I did that to force it to rescan and find the local album art. No idea if it’ll work l, but we’ll see I guess. Either way I think there’s definitely a big here; too bad we can’t get anyone from Plex to notice.

32

New info — I decided to try the same procedure on my condo server , same account two different servers, same problems with cover art

All was good there after the rematch, but I just tried a refresh metadata on this server leaving the other server alone and bam, the problem is back

This leads me to believe that if I try the same refresh metadata that the problem will return on my home server too.

Getting closer to a reproducible sequence which might help us report a bug

33

More info on the reproduced problem:

Every problem case is a duplicate, but not all duplicates are problems

In fact, I have some cases with the same album several times and only one of them is a problem

I will try to determine a pattern

34

On my condo server I tried a couple times to rematch (fix) and then refresh Metadata and the pesky issue continued to happen.

But I realized I never deleted the caches on the condo server.

After deleting the caches I re-ran refresh metadata and after the first run everything looks good — in fact some of the problem albums that had blank cover art then were fixed to the correct (my) cover art on this first run with cleared caches.

So it does appear that something in those caches may have contributed to the problem.

I will continue to re run the refresh to see if it reappears, perhaps one of the duplicates gets cached in a way that confuses the next run of refresh???

35

Well refreshing metadata keeps bringing the problem up , even after clearing the cache

The best I can do is “unmatch” the problematic albums and never run refresh all metadata

That is my only work around right now

So far the nightly processes don’t seem to create the problem, it starts to happen as soon as I run “refresh all metadata”

At this time I think the bug is in that refresh routine.

I’m curious about your results.

36

Just found this:

I’m testing now — turned off ipv6 , cleared caches, unmatched the problem albums, and now running refresh metadata

37

Nice. Mine are Ok so far but it’s only been a couple days. I think I’ll try what you linked to there and see if that’ll work too. That’s similar, but more extensive than what I did. Gotta head out but wanted to respond real quick.

38

Some additional info:

On my Plex-Home server my thumbnails are still fine, I HAVE NOT run a “refresh all metadata” there and my “workaround” was simply to unmatch the problem albums and leave them unmatched – thereby never running “refresh all metadata” and that works in the sense that my cover art is not reset to blank but I’m also missing the lyrics and other advantages of matching those albums.

On my Plex-Condo server I deleted one of the problematic libraries, deleted caches, cleaned bundles, optimized db, etc… Then I restarted Plex and loaded these albums as a new library. All the thumbnails were fine initially.

BUT THEN I did a “refresh all metadata” on the new library. After running that process the problems began again, first with a couple albums last night and now, as of this morning, there are 23 out of 736 that are missing thumbnails. ALL of the 23 are duplicates in the sense that they are the same album but a different version, such as “Let It Be (MFSL)” and “Let It Be (used copy)”.

Furthermore, a different library with an album with similar name like “Let It Be (CD)” is now missing it’s thumbnail.

To reproduce the bug/problem then follow these steps:

  • Load two albums with same artist, similar name – different editions for example
  • Run “refresh all metadata”
  • thumbnail for one of the albums will either disappear immediately or shortly later
  • same thumbnail will be blank on other devices (iOS, Apple TV)

Turning the setting ipv6 off and clearing caches, cleaning bundles, etc… did not help me. They seemed to at first, but once I ran “refresh all metadata” the problems reappeared

They all sound promising but now I think this is isolated to a bug in the matching logic for near matches

The only workaround I have is to reload the library and never ever run “refresh all metadata”

Perhaps you can help me at this point find someone at Plex who can help us debug this from here, I think I’ve isolated it down to a problem with “Refresh All Metadata” and the matching logic (perhaps caching logic is flawed for similarly named albums after a refresh all metadata).

I suspect you will run into the same problem as soon as you run “Refresh All Metadata” the pesky problem will reappear I’m guessing. I’ll be interested if you see the same behavior.

39

Very interesting. Yes, it definitely seems to point to being an issue with matching albums with similar names. It also seems as though PMS is not necessarily always using local metadata and embedded/sidecar artwork either, because that should always work if the data is present (which it is in these cases).

I tried refreshing all metadata, however, right afterwards I unmatched the problematic albums… so far so good. I’ll definitely let you know if I encounter any issues.

Maybe @ChuckPa or @BigWheel could help this information get to the right place/person!

40

i

do you have the logs covering that time? Or can you maybe make a library that only has few albums in it with similar names and grabs logs after refreshing metadata and the issue happens. ( suggesting that because I imagine your regular library is large and will probably will be hard to sift through the logs for them)