Endless music scanning and various artists not working

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Server Version#: 1.18.0.1944
Player Version#: app.plex.tv

Since the new music scanner plex for me is useless.
Every change sends my music library to scan for hours in which time all other scans stop.

Various artist folders with flac files which worked sublime are now broken.
When using an album tag 2019, artist tag the real artist and an album artist tag various artists newly added files to an existing folder get added to plex but outside of the existing 2019 album, so now i have alot of entries there which should belong to 2019 album but are seperate. In plex interface, album and album artists are the same but placed outside the album. When i plex dance it gets fixed after waiting for hours for the scan to complete. Which i can only do after waiting for hours after adding the music in the first place.

Why would you break something so basic. With the scanner taking hours it has me looking for alternative media server solutions like emby.
I cannot have these breaks every time you decide something needs to change and every time the change is bad for us users.

I have just payed for a new year but this seriously has me considering canceling plex.

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Well put. I asked during the beta that there be a way to gracefully stop the scanning, as users with large libraries were reporting their UI blocked. No luck there :crazy_face:

I’m guess the lack of response was because there are some ways to have it run smoothly. What I can suggest to you are a couple of things if you like.

The new set of Articles about Plex Music are here:

I’m sorry if the new system requires a lot of changes on your part.
On the good side, I think you can disable a lot of automation that’s occurring.
Look at your Settings - Show Advanced and try to set most database tasks to manual.

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I get album groupings both single artist and various artists as before no problem but I do get the endless scanning, primarily it seems with various artists albums. New music is added every day to a relatively large library so I am stuck in an endless loop with the music scanner redoing metadata scans, holding up other library metadata items. Are the Plex team aware of this issue?

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Well, at least you tried, and saw it as a potential problem.

The problem with doing that, is that by it’s nature and design, it requires you to manually scan the entire music library. Maybe just my bad luck, or I have the options wrong somehow, but that forces a scan of the whole library again, which I’m trying to avoid.

I agree, it will stop the automatic scanning until you decide it’s appropriate, but that doesn’t solve the basic problem of the repetitive, endless scans that shouldn’t happen when your settings are to only scan the folder that’s changed.

I’m hoping it’s a problem they’re working on behind the scenes, and one day it will just magically stop the unnecessary scanning of the whole library.

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Everyone’s installation is unique and faces it’s own set of challenges.

Some of the challenges you are born with, some of the challenges you get from your environment. To overcome the Plex challenges that come with the software, I’ve read a lot of articles and forum topics. I’ve named my files, tagged them, and organized them perfectly into correct folder structures based on what I’ve read. I’ve chosen Plex settings that optimize usability.

To overcome the challenges of my environment, I make sure my network is running flawlessly and that I have no errors in my Plex logs about UPnP, Relay, database is locked, inode limits, and the like. I store my files on the fastest NAS setup I can reasonably afford, 1 SSD and a few HDs.

Every single time I add something to my Library, it’s found on the first scan, and nothing requires searching again. I never have endless scanning. My system works great. My Various Artists work great. I use FLAC, MP3, M4A, and am constantly impressed with Plex on QNAP and Apple.

So unless you want to define your exact problem with logs and steps to reproduce, I’ll say I experience only success with music when I follow the directions.

Not only that, but the additional things it does like tour dates… amazing.

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Well there are still some clear bugs:

  • various artists compilations with tracks from different years are not handled correctly
  • various artists compilations with tracks from different genres are not handled correctly
  • various artists compilations with tracks residing in different folders are not handled correctly
  • artist listings don’t include tracks from compilations
  • even with local metadata preferred, Plex still does slow and bandwidth-wasting lookups of metadata/pictures from the internet
  • even with local metadata preferred, Plex still seems to waste cpu time generating (unnecessary) Musicbrainz acoustic id’s for each track
1 Like
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Because I play my content locally, I never deeply analyze.
I also use MusicBrainz Picard on the tracks before they are added.
Maybe those are reasons I have a more positive experience?

Thanks for taking the time to post your list of issues.
It’s a really nice list.

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I think a lot of us would have the same positive experience if we followed your example. It sounds like you have created a new library, tagged them with Picard by matching to an existing MB release, then added your albums to the library. Playing content only locally also gives you the luxury of skipping over some of the stumbling blocks and time consuming “features” that others require.

If the above is true, you likely won’t bump into any of the hiccups and annoyances that come from a music library upgrade, or even creating a new library with the same files, folders and embedded metadata that worked very well with the old system.

I too have been using MusicBrainz Picard since the moment I found out MB was going to be used by Plex for any new additions to the music library. I’ve also been adding a lot of releases to MusicBrainz, because they don’t have an entry for my music.

But there’s a lot of music in my library still “unmatched” because there isn’t an entry in the MB database. Somewhere around 400 albums. I only have about 2000 albums in total, so that’s a big percentage of unmatched music. Maybe I’m just selfish, stubborn, or stupid, but I’m not going to remove 20% of my music until I find the time to add those releases to MusicBrainz so that Plex is working with a perfect environment.

Plex finds all new additions (for me) almost instantly, even if they don’t have an MB entry. That is, they are visible and playable, with the correct artist, genre, album covers, track artists, etc. using either the embedded tags or through an actual match with MusicBrainz, or a combination thereof.

The annoying problem, probably because of the unmatched albums, rears it’s ugly head every time new music is added. Plex re-scans the whole library, The logs are full of entries such as:
Activity: updated activity c5495657-a28e-41be-ba24-ab21621660e7 - completed 2.9% - Scanning Music & Videos
Scanner: Processing directory C:\Users\Lee\Music\Albums\Trooper\Trooper (parent: yes)
Skipping over directory 'Trooper\Trooper', as nothing has changed; removing 2 media items from map.
and those continue until the entire library is scanned. Each and every time. Plex has a perfect record in unnecessary, repetitive scans.

Apologies - rant over. :face_with_head_bandage: I’m just getting tired of people suggesting it’s my fault, because Plex/MB cant find a match. Plex needs to turn down the matching routine a notch or two,

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To add to this excellent list:

  • No elegant way of dealing with collaborations of multiple artists. (<“artist1”, “artist2”> or <“artist1” & “artist2”> type of tags.)
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There needs to be a way to disable matching/acoustic-id’ing completely. You’d expect “prefer local metadata” to do that, but it doesn’t.

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Personally, I don’t care if Plex acoustically ID’s my music, or if it tries to match. I do have “Prefer local metadata” enabled, as well as local metadata for the Artist genre enabled, so that my genres and posters have priority and Plex just fills in the blanks. (The artist genre Plex applied was annoying, until I found the separate setting for it)

LOL - A lot of my albums are ripped from vinyl LP’s and 45’s. Some are over 50 years old, and I’ve had them since I was about 11 or 12. You can imagine the quality. I use software to fix up the crackles and pops, but no accoustic ID is ever gonna match mine, or is likely match-able by anyone else. :smile: To my surprise, the majority of them still sound pretty good!

As for the matching, try once when you add the media for the new material, and then just leave it for part of the process during the regular maintenance periods. I know from logs that Plex scans the music library during maintenance, so the full scan of your library when you add new music seems an unnecessary overkill.

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Yes in principle there’s no harm in trying to acoustically match for missing metadata, although if your library is big it could take days, and it appears that there’a a bug that causes Plex to start the scanning process over and over again.

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Sometimes, those are classified as “features” :rofl:

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