GuestDJ doesn’t appear to do anything

GuestDJ never does anything. Being dependent on Sonic Analysis I thought I’d kick off a manual “Analyze”for the Music Library in Plex Dash to see if that would help. The Analyzing doesn’t appear to ever kick off. Never shows it’s doing anything of the sort in “Server Activities”. Any thought on how I can troubleshoot? Is this a case of GuestDJ not working because Sonic Analysis isn’t? Sonic Analysis is turned on in Library settings. And I have PlexPass. Thank you

Need more details on media server platform, CPU type etc

Ubuntu 22.04
Intel 13700h 13th gen i7
16 gig RAM

Pretty much every of the Guest DJs is indeed reliant on the Sonic Analysis.
It needs to have completed at least once before.
If your server/library is newly created, chances are that sonic analysis hasn’t been completed yet.

It needs to be activated both

  • in the properties of your Plex music library
  • in the server settings under Library - “Analyze audio tracks for sonic features”

You can check if sonic analysis has been completed at least once, by taking a look into your Plex data folder, subfolder \Plug-in Support\Databases.
If you see one or several subfolders named like /Music Analysis nn in there, the analysis has been completed before.
If you don’t, analysis has yet to be finished.

Analysis on an existing library takes place during the server maintenance period. https://support.plex.tv/articles/201553286-scheduled-tasks/
You might want to make sure that this has been planned during a time where

  • there server preferably has rather low load from regular users
  • the server is still actually running and is not hibernated or stopped
  • the server still has access to the network and all the media storage

You could also try to temporarily extend the time window for the maintenance period, so it can spend longer on the analysis per day.

The sonic analysis is computationally quite expensive and benefits from both multiple CPU cores, fast access to the media storage, and fast access to the general /tmp folder.
Do also keep in mind that the analysis takes place per album. Which means if you have one of those rather insane boxed sets with, let’s say, 120 discs in it, it has to analyse all the tracks of those 120 discs at once, and needs to have plenty of free space in the /tmp folder to store all of them at the same time.

When I recently had to recreate my analysis data, it took 3–4 days with a daily window of 8 hours to finish the analysis. (3,660 albums, 42,000 tracks) That was on an Intel Core i5 13600K CPU.

Analysis will use max. 50% of the available threads of your CPU.

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Wonderful amount of information to run with here. Thank you! Will report back once I (hopefully) find the solution.

There aren’t any subfolders named /Music Analysis nn in the \Plug-in Support\Databases directory. So I guess it’s never completed an analysis. I adjusted the maintenance window to go 23 hours a day to see what would happen. The server successfully “Scans” fine and the Server also identifies “Sonic Analysis” as an active activity, but memory and CPU stay idle. After a day of this the progress on “Sonic Analysis” remains at 0%. Thoughts?

Okay, making progress… I think. Am seeing “sonic analysis” showing up in the logs for the first time now. In “Scheduled Tasks” I deselected “Update all Libraries during Maintenance”, "Upgrade media analysis during maintenance"and “Perform extensive media analysis during Maintenance”. Re-kicked off maintenance schedule to run for the next 23 hours. Server CPU is now looking like it’s actually doing something hovering around 20%. fingers crossed.

So just to button this up, for some reason In “Scheduled Tasks” deselecting “Update all Libraries during Maintenance”, "Upgrade media analysis during maintenance"and “Perform extensive media analysis during Maintenance” got the Sonic Analysis to work for the first time. All is well and am really enjoying the GuestDJ now.

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