Hi. This may not be the proper forum, but I’m sure somebody will move me.
I have been running a Plex server on a Synology NAS for several years. Recently my son pointed out he couldn’t find some albums, so I looked on a Plex app and, true enough, not there. So I took a dive into the server itself and and saw that they were there, just not scanning. I didn’t really take note at the time that 90% of my music files were just dropped willie-nillie, i.e., not in album folders, just random songs. I didn’t think much of it because I rarely go to the source, just the interface. Anyway, I could tell you about the hours of PlexDance, permission checking, blah blah blah. Even copied everything over to a portable hard drive and set up a new server on a PC. No dice. Finally realized that everything is supposed to be arranged in album folder format, which it must have been because it’s been working flawlessly for years.
I have absolutely no idea what happened. It seems to have occurred while I was out of the country for a month (and nobody else at home), so it “appears” to have happened spontaneously. Well, whatever the cause, I am well and truly FUBAR’d. I have approximately 60,000 individual songs without albums, and I don’t have the first clue what to do about it. Other than spending the next several months trying to manually fix it.
Does anybody out in Plexland have any suggestions? I just figured this out about an hour ago, and haven’t yet started scouring the interwebs for any programs that can do this for me (Musicbrainz comes to mind, but I doubt it’s built for this).
And all this time I thought having a RAID setup made me bulletproof…
I think the most common issue with NAS or external drives is that, if the drives are allowed to spin down during idle times, and Plex tries to refresh metadata, oftentimes the drives don’t spin up fast enough. When this happens, Plex may fail to detect some files on the drive (because the drive isn’t up to speed yet), and assume they’ve been deleted. Plex then removes them from libraries. What you’re seeing doesn’t exactly sound like that issue, but it could be a factor. To prevent that scenario from happening, you should disable the “Empty trash automatically after every scan” option on your server:
When you said “No dice” after all the things you’ve tried, what does that mean? Did the new server not find the music? Did it catalog the music in the same “willie-nillie” way that the old server devolved into?
Are your files fully tagged with metadata, or do you depend on Plex to gather metadata from online sources? Is the “Prefer local metadata” option enabled or disabled?
Are you possibly looking at the library in “Tracks” mode, rather than “Album” or “Artist” mode? That seems unlikely, but, you know, sometimes the strangest things…
Plex essentially has two ways to identify your albums:
Folder/filename structure – If your files don’t have embedded metadata, or it isn’t accurate, or the “Prefer local metadata” option is disabled, the folder/filename structure of your music files must conform to Plex’s guidelines in order for Plex to accurately categorize your music.
Embedded metadata – for this to work, your embedded tags must be accurate (with some caveats, listed in the “Potential issues with embedded tags” section below).
If you have accurate embedded tags, and you want to use the “Prefer local metadata” option, I recommend going through that How-To article and see if it helps. You might try it out on a few of the albums that aren’t being cataloged correctly.
With a tool like mp3tag you can easily write out your files into new folders – if they have the Album and Album Artist tags. And if they don’t have those tags, you can create those tags if that information is in the filename.
Now if every file is its own unique mess, you have a problem… But if there is a consistent way that the information is formatted, there are ways to turn it into any other format, including folder and filename layouts.
Thanks for the reply beckfield. No dice meant just that, the new server can’t find the music either. It didn’t catalog any of the music that isn’t in its own album folder (The willie-nillie music is found by looking directly in File Station on the NAS, it doesn’t show up in Plex at all). Most of my files are fully tagged, and I tried switching “Prefer local metadata” on, but same result. And yes, I’m looking at Tracks mode, but also album, artist, etc. All with the same result. Ah, I did try grouping one album that Plex misses into a proper folder and rescanned. It showed up, so I’m going with the “lack of a proper album folder” as the overarching issue. And again, it’s all worked fine for years, the issue just cropped up. I’ve run multiple virus/malware scans to see if something got in there and wiped out the folder structure (which must have been there, even if I don’t recall), but haven’t found anything. And I’m pretty sure I didn’t log in remotely from Portugal in a drunken stupor and messed around with stuff
I’m currently trying to get my music properly organized by uploading it all to Youtube Music. I have no idea if, once it’s done (4-ish days from now) and I download it all back locally, it will be properly sorted out. Perhaps I’ll get lucky. If not, I guess I’ll have to go the long, arduous route and use MP3tag like BanzaiInstitue suggests.
Thanks Banzai. As I said to beckfield, “I’m currently trying to get my music properly organized by uploading it all to Youtube Music. I have no idea if, once it’s done (4-ish days from now) and I download it all back locally, it will be properly sorted out. Perhaps I’ll get lucky.”.
If not, MP3tag it is. To the best of my knowledge, most, if not all, of my music is properly tagged (when I hear the occasionally mislabeled song while I’m tooling around I always make a note and correct it later), so MP3tag should do the trick. It’s just going to be a lot of work. Sigh. Maybe I have a “fun” winter project. On the bright side, I’m retired, so technically I have plenty of time!
Still wish I knew what sort of voodoo magic borked it all in the first place. I don’t have logging enabled on the NAS, so I can’t find the necessary clues. Once I have it all sorted out I’m going to do an occasional incremental backup the old-fashioned way, air-gapped HD. I don’t want to go through this again!
The artwork is from a friend (I am talentless), but the idea is all mine. I was idly watching porpoises porpoising one day and had the random thought “what would you get if you crossed a porpoise with a hippopotamus?” (stone-cold sober, I’ll add). The result gave me a case of the giggles, and a new tattoo.
Is that your creation, or does it come from somewhere?