Merging tracks to albums triggers sonic analysis

General Discussions
1

I’ve noticed that when I merge albums in Plex Music, it seems to trigger Sonic Analysis and a rescan of the entire album. I record 2-hour radio shows weekly, and to keep the Recently Added section clean and organized, I merge each new episode into an existing album (which already contains around 400 episodes, each 2 hours long).

The problem is, once I add a new episode to the album, Sonic Analysis starts running again for the entire album, re-analyzing hours and hours of content that has already been scanned before. This process takes quite a while.

Is there a way to avoid this behavior, or is this just how Plex handles merged albums? Any tips or insights would be greatly appreciated!

2

You could just turn off sonic analysis for this particular library as it doesn’t really make sense (to me at least!) to look for sonic similarities of a 2-hour radio show

Edit: forgot to answer the actual question…

Sonic Analysis will run again if a new track is added to an album as this could have an impact on the sonic similarities of the album as a whole.

To avoid this happening long-form audio formats are probably best off in a separate library from regular music tracks. This way sonic analysis can be switched on or off per library.

3

@jimbob100101

You know what, that’s so true.

I’ve started managing my 75,000 tracks on iTunes and have recently shifted to Plex in the past few years.

I still manage the tags and files via iTunes where the audio files are stored on the NAS where plex music looks up.

I should divide the library and start managing radio files via alternate software.

4

You can have multiple libraries in Plex, and for long-form audio there is an advanced option to ‘store track progress’ so it resumes playback rather than starting from the beginning. Plexamp also has a setting that changes the playback controls for long-form audio.