How do I clear a music library of all albums/tracks?

General Discussions
1

How do I clear a music library of all content, so I can rescan an add everything back again? (Plex has really screwed things up by duplicating lots of albums and tracks with a single location on disk.)

2

Options:

  1. Delete the library.

  2. Edit the library and remove folders pointing to the music files, then scan, empty trash, clean bundles. A library must have at least one folder, so you may need to add a “dummy folder” with no content.

  3. Plex Dance all the files in the library.

3

Thanks for your reply. I should have said, I tried the ‘Plex dance’, to no avail. All the old media remains. Deleting the library itself works, of course, though seems a bit extreme. (I lose the configuration.)

4

I’ve found that if you plex dance an entire library contents the dance does not work. I think they have some built in logic to not delete everything if the entire library appears missing.

To get around this (as I’ve done this a few times) the best thing to do is pick one artist with one album and leave that in the library and then plex dance everything else. Do let plex do all its work including emptying trash and optimise of db as if the music library is big (I’ve 125k tracks) it can take some time to clean out of the db.

BTW… be aware. When doing this plex can change the guid=“plex://track/xxxx” for some tracks. This can be a pain if it changes for tracks you have rated, played and/or added to playlists. This even happens when using embedded metadata. Anyhow, just letting you know as its something I typically have to fixup afterwards in the db.

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5

Very helpful, thank you! I’ll give that a go.

6

Unless you have done a lot of configuration work that you need to save, deleting the library is the best option, IMHO.

When fighting music metadata problems, turn off all the Sonic Analysis and extended metadata lookups… Make sure the basics work first. Then, turn all the goodies back on.

It had to delete and recreate my library a half dozen times in the beginning, but now that I follow Plex’s rules to the letter I haven’t had a music problem in years.

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7

Thanks for the tip. What exactly do you mean by “Plex’s rules”, by the way?

8

https://support.plex.tv/articles/200265296-adding-music-media-from-folders/

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