Server Version#: 1.18.7.2457
Plex Music Agent, preferring local data disabled.
I have some real strange problems with Plex after adding a bunch of music from an external library and from my Lidarr library. Lidarr writes additional metadata into the audiofiles for better handling in the future. But plex seems to be having trouble with those files.
These are my observations, starting after a PMS restart:
Plex will eventually do it’s scheduled tasks and also scan the music library
After seemingly finished scanning the library. plex will still show that it scans one particular album (supposedly where it is stuck). This stays for hours and hours.
Meanwhile, under settings and “alerts” plex will show many other updates in both other libraries and music libraries.
after 10 hrs or so, plex won’t show that its still scanning that one album anymore. Nothing is being posted in alerts too.
At this point and long before that, both manual and automatic library updates and individual item updates won’t create metadata. So lets say radarr adds another movie: The movie will be shown in the library, but the metadata won’t be updated.
new TV episodes, these won’t even show up, no matter what i do.
manually pulling metadata does not work too.
interestingly though, the logs say that the metadata is found correctly and pulled from the server.
Hitting another scheduled media library scan circle won’t resolve that problem. No new episodes will show up, no metadata will be updated. Only a server restart resolves the problem for exactly one cycle of scheduled library scans.
The problem is really hard to debug, as it seems that only a few items from my Lidarr library are affected. Here is an example of how the metadata looks of one of the affected albums:
this issue is extremely annoying! I have removed several albums and artists (removing, restarting plex, scanning media. takes ages!) and there are still eventually folders or songs which will completely freeze any library scanning actions.
New media gets added and i cannot update the metadata for it, even though the logs and the “Alerts” page says, the mediadata was updated.
I don’t know what to do anymore. There are no errors in the logs. Why is this such a huge problem for the library scanner, why doesn’t it just skip those items?!
I honestly don’t have any specific details to add to this, other than I can’t believe I stumbled across your findings. I started having the EXACT same issues once I decided to add my music, all flac with plenty of metadata like yours, and I too started seeing the exact same weird behavior. You clearly summarized it well. I was going crazy and was constantly restarting my Plex docker to alleviate it.
Very bummed that you have not seen a single reply to this, so I am bumping. Let’s see what happens…
unfortunately this problem still exists on my end too. It drives me crazy.
I will now start removing all my music from my library and only add a handful of albums at a time and see if it makes any difference.
At this point, music is just completely unusable for me and i only will be doing this out of curiosity.
btw. i have had plex running now for 20 days (with much needed restarts inbetween) and it didn’t change the problem at all. It sill updates metadata for albums as it seems. By pure chance, i was even able to observe, that it keeps looking for metadata for the same albums, even though they already have metadata. Scheduled tasks are reduced to a minimum to help with the issue, but that doesn’t work either.
