just a quick question: how does Plex generate and keep track of GUIDs in music libraries, which aren’t matched against MusicBrainz?
My Library just won’t work with any online content matcher. Due to that, the library runs on the Personal Media Artist Agent. Now, if I have to delete the Library and readd it to Plex, is Plex able to match the ‘old’ songs to the ‘new’ songs (so that ratings won’t break)? And if so, how? Afaik Plex uses GUIDs for matching; are they Generated from the file path or a combination of title, album and/or artist? Or are they just completely random?
Would be really grateful for some insight about how Plex handles GUIDs…
Because of your specific content/organisation or because you’re getting errors?
No, personal media items don’t have unique static guids. They are just tied to the item id which is just the auto incrementing value from when the items are added into the database.
Its because of the content. It’s not listed on most online DBs, and even if it is listed, it consists of like 100k flac files, which would need an eternity and a half to get metadata from an online source for.
Luckly this isn’t needed, since the tags across the entire collection are in a good state.
Hmm… okay, so what happens if I add the folder with the new stuff to the library, run the scanner so that plex can “link” the new files to the old artist and then delete the old library?
I should probably shed some light onto what I am trying to achieve.
Basically, my current library has some inconsistencies and I fixed these outside of Plex. Now the Problem is, to get these fixes into plex. Since we are talking about ~100k files, its not feasible to update these by hand, so I used some scripts to fix consistency issues. But now I don’t actually know which files were fine and which got changed, so my solution to that would be to just dump the old library and replace it with the new one.
The Problem I have then are ratings. I don’t use normal Playlists and Smart Playlists aren’t affected, since they mostly use Artist and/or Album filters and these should still work fine with the new library. But afaik Plex uses the GUID of the Songs to match the ratings, so I want to keep the GUIDs for new Library.
Alternatively having the ratings match against for example the Artist/Album/Song Combination would also work fine, but so far I’ve not found any way to do that.
