I have recently bought a Synology NAS, so I moved there all my media libraries from my PC and installed a new Plex server on NAS.
I had no issues with Movies and Photos, but Music folder is a mess.
Over the years, I had worked hard on my Music collection, tagging everything correctly so Plex would recognize it, changing a lot of artist and album pictures etc.
Now everything is gone. As predictable, after the scan Plex just used its own pictures. Also, and that is strange, a lot of albums are not recognized correctly anymore. Some of them are present twice, some are split, some are not there at all.
Is there a way to copy all the relevant info from the old database to the new one? Of course, just copy and past won’t work because of the directory change of the files. I wouldn’t want to check my almost 90K music files one by one and fix every error.
There is only one method, but it is unfortunately the most involved one.
Copy the primary database files from the Windows machine into the plex data folder on the NAS. Retain the already existing database files on the NAS. They are useful for looking up the required folder locations and syntax on a linux machine.
Then edit the primary database file directly and use search & replace to change all path listings from the Windows format (e.g. D:\Movies\...) to the Linux format of the NAS device (e.g. /volume1/share/Movies/...).
Keep in mind that Windows uses backspaces \ to denote subfolders, while Linux uses regular slashes /, so you need to replace these as well.
So I hope you didn’t change the finer folder structure within your libraries too much when you transitioned the files. Or the effort for replacing all the adresses will be considerable.
Hello Otto and first of all thank you for your help.
I am afraid I am not advanced enough to do that. I hoped that I could just open the file with a text editor and do “replace”, but it seems like I’d need some tools I do not have. I don’t even know how to input the commands explained in the article you linked!
The structure of my music folder is basically the same. It just changed from:
H:\Music
to
//Nasname/Music/
All the subfolders and files names are the same.
Too bad, I am afraid I will have to work. One thing that happened is that it split “Alice Cooper” the solo artist and “Alice Cooper” the band in two different artists. I just had to correct the association on the latter, though.
What I don’t understand is why it messed up the associations of many albums and why some artist pictures are not available anymore.
