I’m going to guess, from a quick look at the Plex Media Server log I added the files @
Jan 28, 2020 17:13:39.430
Jan 28, 2020 17:13:39.430 [7148] DEBUG - Activity: registered new activity 39865798-594b-4877-bd3b-72be73198ea7 - Scanning
Jan 28, 2020 17:13:39.430 [7148] INFO - Notification: Scanning the "Music & Videos" section -
Jan 28, 2020 17:13:40.164 [7148] DEBUG - Scanner: Processing directory F:\Plex Videos\Albums\The Supremes (parent: yes)
Jan 28, 2020 17:13:40.173 [7148] DEBUG - Scanner: Processing directory F:\Plex Videos\Albums\The Supremes\I'm Living in Shame (parent: yes)
Jan 28, 2020 17:13:40.174 [7148] DEBUG - Directory had 2 files, database had 0 files, can't skip.
File names are:
F:\Plex Videos\Albums\The Supremes\I'm Living in Shame\01 - I'm Living in Shame.mp3
F:\Plex Videos\Albums\The Supremes\I'm Living in Shame\02 - I'm So Glad I Got Somebody (Like You Around).mp3
I will add, the new media is added almost instantly with correct cover, track title etc., and playable from any device. That is not the problem. The scanning of the complete library after that is the annoying “bug” or "feature: that doesn’t seem right.
Thanks @leelynds - The assertion by the development team is that scanning is now much faster than before and should be able to handle the extra activities
What I can see from your log is that the scan for adding the album of two items completed at 17:14:05. Does scanning continue beyond that time. It started at 17:13:39
Jan 28, 2020 17:14:03.960 [7148] DEBUG - Activity: updated activity 39865798-594b-4877-bd3b-72be73198ea7 - completed 100.0% - Scanning Music & Videos
I will now look at the logs from recent and old versions of Plex Media Server provided by @Ambrodog
I still don’t understand the need to scan the complete library, which I believe activity 39865798-594b-4877-bd3b-72be73198ea7 - completed 100.0%
is in fact doing. I do have the options set to only scan the folders that have changed. I don’t think the scanners work that way in a Movie or TV library.
If you only add one album with 2 tracks, guaranteed match-able at MusicBrainz, like I did, the process is quick. But, if you were to add 10 albums with 12 tracks at the same time, then 10 scans of the complete library are initiated. If those albums don’t have a match at MB, then other processes kick in during the matching. I believe the audio is also finger-printed, a search for lyrics is initiated (no way to turn it off), etc. This happens even when the files have the necessary embedded metadata. The scanning process takes considerably longer, and there is a lot more activity happening on the server.
Initially I had the same problem as others report with very long scanning times. I have deleted and re-created the library 3 times since the new scanner was released, and my latest attempt has the best results.
Thank you for the time. I’ll bow out now, my concerns are probably not the same as the other users in this thread. I do have some other “glitches” in the music system I’d like to see addressed, but I’ll just continue on bumping them up until someone responds.
@sa2000 just to give you an example of my issue, I just added 2 albums I have no unmatched albums but Plex music scanner is trying to re-match albums and find lyrics.This will take over an hour to complete using considerable resources. The 2 albums were added at approx 9:55am at 11:28am I finally have to close plex to stop the scanning. Log attachedPlex Media Server Logs_2020-01-31_11-26-11.zip (8.7 MB)
@sa2000 The new scanner cannot seem to handle the extra activities of larger music collections. I have over 600 albums and 40,000 songs and as mentioned when adding a new album, all albums seem to be re-checked creating high cpu usage for over an hour.
I’ve been having this experience too, except I’ve got about 200k songs and my disks are just 7200rpm platters, so it takes about 24 hours per music scan.
It also happens even when I don’t add new music, it’s scanning my music library twice a week., even though I’ve disabled periodic scanning.
I don’t care about the CPU use or anything (even though it is a nuisance). The issue I have is that it means that any other content being added doesn’t get picked up, which requires manual intervention. And often when I click “cancel library scan” in the UI, it doesn’t work. Most of the time I have to RDP into my server and kill the scanner process.
Right now, I’m half inclined to delete the music library from Plex until the matter’s resolved, it’s just too much hassle and I hate that it’s as cumbersome.
To the above point that the scanner is faster: my library used to scan in about 45 minutes, and it’s about 30 times slower. I don’t know what theory or logic that idea of it being faster comes from, but it’s had a drastically opposite effect for me.
I changed these settings to help with the issue “Prefer local metadata” Album Art “local files only” scanner “plex media scanner” agent “personal media artists” and unchecked everything else.
Basically this seems to disable most of the music scanner features and make it work like the old scanner, providing your files are tagged properly. There seems to be no way to get support or acknowledgment of this issue from Plex
I did get back to your logs yesterday. I can see an issue where we are trying to get lyrics for about 90 albums and 7000 tracks - all classed as Various Artists. The scans themselves do complete soon after they are started - like in the case you provided logs for where you added
O:\Plex Music Archive\ACDC - Greatest Songs
O:\Plex Music Archive\The Very Best Of Swing!
O:\Plex Music Archive\New Electro Swing Jazz Review
I can see another scan triggered afterwards because of changes to your _gsdata_ directory - some file sync tool? That was an unnecessary extra scan of O:\Plex Music Archive\
The bit that appears to be taking a long time is the lyrics search and I will be discussing this with the development team
Yeah, I’m pretty sure the settings in agents are ignored by design. It’s been mentioned in a few threads that everything is configured through the “Advanced” section for the music library and the agent settings are not used. I’m not sure why there is still a setting for Music agents if that’s true.
There’s no setting for LyricFind in the advanced section. Your only option is to download lyrics, as it seems enabled by default.
The issue is actually to do with adding an album that has “Various Artists” tracks and we end up refreshing all albums and tracks for “Various Artists” and I believe you have about 100 albums and 7000 tracks in this set
So you could compare behavior between adding an album that has “Various Artists” and one that does not. I think the album that caused this last time was
O:\Plex Music Archive\New Electro Swing Jazz Review
While it may be necessary to refresh an “Artist” when you add an album, refreshing “Various Artists” is basically useless. Various Artists has no genres, styles, moods, country, and similar artists associated with it (unless you have manually edited those fields)
In a regular “Artist” there could be a new genre, etc associated with the artist when an album is added, and refreshing makes sense.
If the music scanner actually followed the rules set in the server for Libraries, such as “Run a partial scan when changes are detected” and in “Scheduled Tasks” to “Refresh metadata periodically” and “Refresh local metadata every three days” the excessive scanning could be controlled better… BTW, I’m pretty sure the new scanner never refreshes online metadata during the maintenance runs.
Happy we’re narrowing down the reasons scans can take so long sometimes.
Just want to point out this was not an issue with the old music scanner in regards to scanning times, my collection always contained many various artist albums.
