duplicates are a tricky problem, you can have files of different quality/mixes with the same tags but different actual audio, or you can have completely bit by bit duplicates (which may have completely different tags), and everything in between.
I don’t have any mac recommendations, mediamonkey has some some duplicate finder functionality, but it is not automated and gets tedious going through and looking at what to keep/delete.
Most of the time I just don’t worry about duplicates.
It’s been a multi-year process (which I’ve only recently restarted) to go through and clean up tags, remove duplicates/junk files.
Unfortunately, there is no magic bullet that I am aware of, other than starting from scratch and adding only known good files.
Ok thanks. When I saw the duplicates being 51,000, to go through and delete half of these files would take an enormous amount of time. If I could reduce the # of tracks from 185,000 down to 160,000 I would think this would be better all around due to a smaller database size.
The scan continues and it’s gone up only a few tracks since I restarted the scan. Doesn’t look like the parameter made much difference. It’s at 60,928 now and I have a total of 184,496 tracks. Any other suggestions as to what might be going on and what I could change to speed up the scan?
You could download the logs (via plex web > settings > troubleshooting) and look for the Plex Media Scanner Matcher.log and this will show you time stamps and filenames of what is being scanned and how long it takes.
logs are not easy to read, but if you keep at it, you can probably get the gist of what is going on.
Thank you. I took a look at the logs. It downloaded many logs and there are logs with the name Plex Media Scanner Matcher.log (also has Plex Media Scanner Matcher 2.log…)
A few hours ago, I wound up deleting the Music library in Plex and creating a new one, adding one music sub-folder at a time.
I added about 1/4 of the sub-folders and will leave it finish, then I’ll add the other sub-folders.
So far, the tracks reported in the Music library is increasing by about 800 tracks per minute which is more reasonable than what I was seeing before where it seemed to add about 20 per hour, at least when I started to watch what was going on more carefully.
At this point it’s loaded 22,000 tracks within about 3 hours. Only time will tell if the process slows down with either the # of tracks or particular sub-folders.
The process was running fast, I was seeing total tracks in the library going up quickly - around 800 tracks per minute. Now it’s just crawling, I see the total tracks increasing sporadically. The spinning orange circle reports ‘scanning music - cd3’, is about 1/3 of the total circle and seems to be stuck there as that status doesn’t seem to change.
When I examined the log files, the process is going through my classic library. I have a large library of that type of music. I’m wondering if perhaps there are many possible matches for classic music and it takes longer to process these.
The last entries in the Plex Media Scanner matcher. log are as follows:
Jul 30, 2020 07:50:50.597 [0x11a14edc0] DEBUG - Match: Fingerprinting of first and last tracks completed in 0.6 sec.
Jul 30, 2020 07:50:50.597 [0x11a14edc0] DEBUG - Match: Finding matches for mozart - complete mozart - vol 43 cd 03 - die zuberflote
Jul 30, 2020 07:50:50.597 [0x11a14edc0] DEBUG - Match: Album might be Various Artists: 0
Jul 30, 2020 07:50:50.599 [0x11a14edc0] DEBUG - Match: Considering 10 releases from fingerprinting.
Jul 30, 2020 07:50:50.599 [0x11a14edc0] DEBUG - Match: Ended up with 5 releases from fingerprinting.
Jul 30, 2020 07:50:50.599 [0x11a14edc0] DEBUG - Match: Cache hit on 84a7648f-4a7d-4a71-afa4-e0ef26baa1b0
CPU utilization is super high - Plex Media Server - 99.8% - 100%. I have lots of memory on this computer - 128GB, so memory is not an issue. Nothing else is running other than the basic OS items.
The Plex activity process seems to be moving as I see the status changing sometimes - earlier it said “scanning music - cd3’,”. Now it says ". Now it says "Volume booklet 40 booklet scans’. No idea what that booklet scan is.
Most of the scanning/matching is single threaded, so it will generally max out one core, and generally that will be the bottleneck, how fast a single core cpu is on your computer.
if you want better luck at a ninja/mod/plex team member to look, you need to attach the full logs zip file (plex web > settings > troubleshooting > download logs > drop zip into reply here).
Make sure that ‘verbose’ logs are OFF, and debug logs are ON.
I currently setup Plex with about 1/3 of my total music collection (setup about 60,000 tracks in Plex music out of my 185,000 track in my total Apple music collection).
The current scan is taking up 100% CPU and has been running that way for 24 hours. The activity status shows about 1/3 completion to date so if that continues at this rate, looks like it’ll take another 2-3 full days to complete.
If I load my entire music library into Plex, looks like a scan would take almost 2 solid weeks of 100% CPU busy. That doesn’t make sense to me. Why would plex be so slow at loading and scanning a music library of 185,000 tracks?
Good News:
I let the scan run and after 3.5 days, my music library is loaded in Plex. For whatever reason, the scan of my classical library took about 75% of that entire time and yet it accounts for about 20% of my entire library. I don’t understand why the scan of the classical folder took so long. Regardless, it’s done now.
Mac Music Playlist didn’t get loaded in Plex
My playlists from Mac Music did not get loaded in Plex music.
Question 1: Should my playlists from Mac Music have been migrated as part of the library scan in Plex?
Question 2: Is there a way to have my playlists from Mac Music setup in Plex somehow? If not, is there a way to create Playlists in Plex and if so, how?
Mac Music default folder & XML
I use the default Mac Music folder however my media is on an external drive.
I exported the XML library and placed it in the same folder as the Mac Music database: Macintosh HD> Users> andrefortier> Music> Music (so there’s a folder Music inside the main Music folder).
Plex iTunes Library XML path parameter
I noticed there’s a parameter in Settings> Plugins> iTunes library XML path.
Question 3: Should I enter anything in that field? I think my Mac Music library is set up in the default folder however not sure how this parameter is designed to work. If the iTunes library XML path needs to be specified how do I enter it in that text box (not sure on the format).
I have been using Plex for many years and sadly I have come to accept they don’t put much emphasis on a tidy music library, why ?, I don’t know. Movies and TV shows are all quite tidy and the collections libraries are quite good. But when it comes to the music library generally its a disorganised mess. I don’t see why we have to keep asking each other how to create a tidy library when we are subscribing for Plex to do this for us. All it needs is the same method to create collections as in movies, a request that has been going on for years. At least it would go some way in achieving what people are asking for. I’m all for hitting off each other for ideas etc which is why we all love this programme so much but c’mon Plex can you just sort this for us. For example if like I have is all my Beatles albums in one folder, yet they are all shown up as individual albums/artists in the main Music Library, even this seems to be random. I would just like the ability to create my own collections and tidy it all up.
