My Plex server is able to scan my music library and it properly plays all songs with the exception of ones with an accented character in the file name, where it shows the file is “unavailable”. Examples:
/Volumes/media/Music/EAC 1.0/Michael Bublé/Call Me Irresponsible/01 - The Best Is Yet to Come - Michael Bublé.mp3
/Volumes/media/Music/EAC 0.1/Voivod/Dimension Hatröss/03 - Chaosmöngers.mp3
/Volumes/media/Music/EAC 0.1/Dvořák/Guarneri Quartet/01 - Piano Quintet in A, Op. 81- Allegro ma non tanto.mp3
I’m running PMS on a mac mini and the library is accessible via a mount to external NAS. I’ve tried rebuilding my library from scratch, rebooting the OS and NAS but nothing has helped. Greatly appreciate any advice!
Server Version#: 1.13.5.5291
OS Version#: OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 (15G22010)
PMS- Aug 19, 2018 10:37:22.058 [0x700001489000] ERROR - Error opening file ‘"/Volumes/media/Music/EAC 1.0/Michael Bublé/Call Me Irresponsible/01 - The Best Is Yet to Come - Michael Bublé.mp3"’ - No such file or directory (2)
Scanner- Aug 14, 2018 21:08:05.377 [0x7000002a0000] ERROR - Exception analyzing media file ‘/Volumes/media/Music/EAC 0.1/Voivod/Dimension Hatröss/03 - Chaosmöngers.mp3’ (Could not parse /Volumes/media/Music/EAC 0.1/Voivod/Dimension Hatröss/03 - Chaosmöngers.mp3 (error=-2): No such file or directory)
are you mounting the drive via samba? I’d try afp to see if that resolves it. Otherwise you may need to rename those artists and remove the umlaut
I have it mounted via NFS. The thing I don’t understand is that Plex can see the file when it scans the library. So what’s happening immediately after the scan to make it unavailable?
I’m not sure it’s a plex issue. My guess is it’s on the Mac end but it’s worthing mounting the drive with samba or afp to see if that produces different results.
@MeatBall - thanks for your quick reply. I agree we haven’t yet identified an issue with Plex and it could be interesting to check the access via SMB or AFP, however, my use case is to mount the drive via NFS. As I mentioned, Plex properly discovers all of my files, including ones with accented characters. It also properly plays any media file perfectly with the exception of those that have an accented character, which immediately shows “unavailable” after the scan.
If anyone has a recommendation on how to continue troubleshooting the existing Plex config (Mac server with NFS mount to drive), it would be very helpful.
After further research, I’ve come to learn that there are multiple ways to interpret unicode character sets (precomposed vs. decomposed), depending on the platform. The interpretation process is called “normalization” and is platform dependent:
To further complicate matters, some volume formats (for example, NFS) have no accepted standard. This puts the responsibility of the high level application (i.e. Plex) to pass-through the names unchanged, or to convert names to the encoding scheme required by the underlying volume format, which in this case is NFS and again, has no accepted standard:
It appears that Plex is using one access mechanism to scan files (as they’re all captured properly in my library) and another access mechanism to stream the file (in the case of a diacritic character, the streaming service can’t find the file). In any case, it doesn’t seem viable to create some workaround in Plex due to the complications mentioned above.
Alas, I’m now investigating a script to process my 1TB of music files and scrub the file names of diacritic characters…
