Music Library: all items disapeared and nothng found when scan the library

Server Version#: 1.18.2.2029
Player Version#:

Hi
I had a music library of over 27,000 files in Plex upgraded the server to 1.18.2.2029 over night all items have disappeared from Plex. scanned library and Plex didn’t find any items. All files are still contained in the same folder as listed in the media folder. how does 27,000 items just disappear over night?

Really frustrating if i have to re add everything because i have fixed everything so that sort information included (the, A, An ect) and select the proper cover art for each album as i added it.

Server Windows 10
Logs below
Plex Media Server Logs_2019-11-19_16-55-06.zip (10.2 MB)

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Having a similar issue after updating to 1.18.2.2029, unraid server

Six music libraries in total, one of them empties from 279 albums to 3 after scanning. None of the others do this!

Plex Media Server Logs_2019-11-19_23-24-05.zip (2.1 MB)

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Hello Plex any response to this issue?

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You realise you can roll back your database file to undo the changes following the scan? That should save you hassle of re-importing

also, do your source folders have sub directories?

My music folder has 3 sub directories (for lossless, high res & lossy) and by adding them individually this issue went away. It’s a temp fix, it also makes no sense because as I mentioned, my other libraries are setup with the same folder structure and do not empty after scanning

Hi no i didn’t know this was possible and trying to find procedures on how to do things like this isn’t easy on this site. do you have a link by chance on how to do it?

It would be nice if there was a proper support system for this software at least for those of us who do pay for Plex.

All my music is in on folder and not split into sub folders. this is how my library was set up way back in the days of Musicmatch and then with MediaMonkey which is still my primary player fpr music but was hopping to migrate it all to Plex but so far has been very disappointing and not a very reliable solution,

thank you in advance

Brett

library db files are saved in:

application support/plexmediaserver/pluginsupport/databases

look for the library db files with dates appended to the extension, that will be the date you roll back to by removing the date and making it the current db file.

make copies of these backups including the current db file before overwriting or changing anything.

In trying to fix this issue I have rolled back several times the last few days, I updated to 1.18.2.2041 and after scanning this particular library again, albums reduced from 290+ to 4 for no apparent reason, no changes were made to the folders containing the music - also odd is the 10 minutes scanning time it takes every time, no new files. My other music libraries takes seconds to complete a scan.

Update: after updating to 1.18.2.2058 this issue seems to have been fixed

I take it back, the issue still persists :frowning:

i unchecked ‘empty trash after scan’ which made it appear the albums were still there

upon re-checking and scanning, albums disappear

frustrating indeed

the offending library is the ‘electronic’ one, which used to be set-up the same as ‘albums’ with plex pointing at just one directory containing the lossy/lossless/high-res sub-folders.

adding those 3 sub-directories is my current workaround, the library no longer empties itself after scanning when set-up like this.

No such drama going on with the ‘albums’ library :thinking:

Could you look into the windows application log using “Event Viewer” and look for application exceptions relating to Plex - note down the times and the event details

Look at the 24 hour period from midnight 19 November

May need to also enable the option to get windows to produce dmp files for application errors - see section on this article regarding the required registry entries
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201455336-crash-logs-plex-media-server/
And then provide dmp file and logs - dmp files to be zipped and sent privately

Whilst investigating this disable automatic scanning and periodic scanning so that scans of movies and tv do not get in the way - and just do music scans manually

Hello,

I have the situation that all albums are gone and the server finds only one album after a new scan. In this one album he lists all the songs but not with the correct album name by the bands. Has someone the same bug or situation?

Best regards

I have sent a PM with the DMP logs and event viewer logs.

I have added the Plex server logs from the same time here as well.
Plex Media Server Logs_2019-11-26_00-39-54.zip (10.3 MB)

Must say I am in the same boat… I no longer have any of my several thousand .MP3 files showing up in my directory d:/MP3 … however I have a few sub-folders in that directory and those are showing up only…

frustrating

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It appears that we are crashing when we run out of memory.
You have a flat directory structure with circa 30,000 tracks which we are trying to match and compare and setup albums

It is best to have artist / album directory structure and a massive flat directory structure is causing the scanner matching process to crash out

Suggest adopting one of the following structures

Music/ArtistName - AlbumName/TrackNumber - TrackName.ext

or

Music/ArtistName/AlbumName/TrackNumber - TrackName.ext

may be we are crashing if you have a massive flat directory - see my response to @Brettarvo

Ive never had this issue before… just started few days ago… was flawless previously. Certainly would really rather not make a separate folder for hundreds of artists just to move files into those.

not good :hot_face:

I have not looked at your logs - it was a guess. The advanced matching algorithms introduced into the new music libraries works best and more efficiently when there is not a gigantic flat directory

Yes I have a Flat directory structure and it has been fine until only a few updates ago no music had been added or removed from the Library and then one day poof it was all gone. I’m not going to put files in individual folders as it is to cumbersome to do so with a library of 27,000 files. My primary media player for music is MediaMonkey and it doesn’t have any issues with the library set up this way and since Plex has these issues and isn’t very reliable i don’t want to spend the hours doing that just for it to disappear again and waste even more time then I already have with my Plex music library probably upwards of 30 hrs and then it vanished.

I really don’t understand how a library can just literally disappear overnight.
How come Plex is continuously re-matching files that have already been matched?

all of my files are named : Artist - Trackname.ext
Realistically to rename and put all of these files in your suggested format would require upwards of 200hrs worth of work and that is just not feasible.

yeah exactly the same here, just not sure how that is an answer that it cannot handle the flat directory when it was doing it perfectly fine… unfortunately I had just purchased plex pass as well… my file names are the same as you mentioned Artist - trackname.ext

really boggles my mind that the answer is build a 1000 folders and move the songs of each artist into those folders and continue to do so from here on in plus having the correct naming of each file…:crazy_face:

It’s not an answer at all because my library IS set-up like sa2000 advised, and STILL emptied from 290+ to 4 albums after scanning :disappointed: That said, now would be a good time to start using the [artist - album] folder structure!

I wonder if changing the agent from Plex Music to Last.fm would help

Anyway… I resorted to deleting and re-adding the offending library, and now all is fine. Clearly a bug of some sort as nothing was changed on the backend.

Having the same issue here. I have (and always have had) an artist/album/track folder structure. Plex media server 1.18.2.2058 for Ubuntu Linux 18.04. This occurred for me a couple weeks ago, probably during an update.