I’m in the middle of this now and experiencing the same issue with Music… duplicate albums and many albums seen as “new” with different matching (not all but many). Very frustrating as moving media for music is definitely different than movies or TV shows despite what that article says…
My movies and shows did alright adding the new library path of the copied Movies\TV and scanning except any movies that were unmatched I had to merge which does make sense a bit but I was disappointed having the exact file name didn’t line it up (select original first and then the “new” one when merging to keep history).
The other issue with Movies I ran into was I started using the “edition” feature recently but Plex saw those in the new path as new titles without an edition instead of matching to the existing title and edition even with the edition flag in the file so I just had to merge those manually too (which was annoying but not horrible to fix).
*** SEE EDIT BELOW ***
If I have it right for worked for Music for you was this:
- Turned off Empty Trash After Every Scan
- In Music Library you had 1 directory (original path) in Folders listings and removed everything from that directory but one artist->album folder
- Scan the library :: Library will appear empty now except for that one artist\album
- Empty Trash :: DO NOT CLEAN BUNDLES
- Edit Music Library and remove original directory path from Folders and add new path as the only folder\directory
- Scan Library
- Check the one album that was left untouched from original directory as reference
- Fix any Unmatched albums (merge or manual update)
- Clean Bundles\Optimize Database
Does that sound right?
Did you have any particular issues with Unmatched albums or did they pick up too?
I didn’t have any problem when I moved Plex DB to the new library and left the old path that didn’t work anymore in and added a new path so I’m thinking your process replicates that to an extent blending a copy with a move.
*** EDIT - Similar but different success ***
I had epiphany after this and tried a different method which worked similarly to the Plex Dance method you performed and depending on your environment and move might work just fine as well.
- Moving from NAS1 (Synology 218+) to NAS2 (QNAP TS-664)
- Moved Plex install following the instructions from NAS1 to NAS2
- NAS1 Plex stopped :: NAS2 Plex running — Movies\TV\Music showing but “file unavailable”
- Mounted NAS1 Media folders to NAS2
- Added NAS1 Network Shares to relevant Plex Libraries, i.e., Movies Library now had original path that doesn’t work and new network share path that does in the Folders listings
- All library media matched and working as expected
- Copied media from NAS1 to NAS2 and added the folders to Plex following the move media article instructions :: TV Shows and Movies mostly worked just fine (some unmatched and the editions issue present)
Now, at this point I removed the old folders from TV Shows and Movie libraries and did the scans and empty trashes and it all went pretty smoothly. Started adding my directory on NAS2 with the copied music content and it went sideways like you experienced as well. The thing is – it worked just fine matching up content from the old dead file path and the network share… and your plex dance worked… so… I did this.
- Removed the NAS2 directory from Music Library
- Scanned and emptied trash
- Only library reference is the old non-working original directory and the network share to the original directory
- Removed the original dead directory - scanned and emptied … no problems.
- Clean bundle and optimize database
- Stopped Plex service
- Disconnected network share to original music folder
- Started Plex service
- Tried to play file - can’t, file not found.
- Added NAS2 local directory to Music Library and left the path to disconnected network share
- Scan library
- Files are matching back up to exiting albums just like they did when I originally moved Plex and pointed at the network share
In the past I didn’t have space to do the copy option when changing directories for re-organizing and had to move files instead and as long as the ‘empty after scan’ was turned off and it was done while Plex service was stopped and don’t remove the old paths from Plex until after scanning the new directory… it would work pretty well so I think that’s what your method and my method I did here is replicating and triggering.
Thanks for mentioning your fix … if you hadn’t mentioned it I wouldn’t have stumbled on either method and I’d have been super annoyed. Otherwise, moving servers was pretty painless overall. Hopefully they’ll update the documentation to include treating Music a bit differently or include the ‘move’ vs ‘copy’ option as an alternative.
