So with the new music scanner a lot of the functionality of the previous premium music agent is now included in all libraries.
While I really like the added information, the reason I didn’t enable the premium scanner previously was because I feared the increase in metadata size. Now I have no way around this, and as I expected, the size of the album metadata just exploded to more than 11GB for around 2000 albums.
This means that my Plex data folder is now at around 28GB, and I’m still waiting on the music scanner to finish refreshing metadata. I really cannot give my Plex server more than 32GB of space right now, so I’d be very happy about info on how to reduce the size of the music library. Obviously, running out of space kills the application, so I need to find a fix or workaround for this.
I just disabled fetching of album art from remote since my library is maintained well and has album covers in each folder. Sadly I don’t know how much of an effect this will have as I guess it’ll take some time to come into effect.
If I have no way of preventing the server to grow larger than 32GB without excluding the music, I’d have to go back to emby, which I’d really like to avoid.
Yeah, I’ll see what I end up with. The issue with this was that it caused the device to run out of space, which prevented the PMS from finishing the scan and doing optimiziation. Luckily I found a few old backups which allowed me to free around one GB.
Disabling fetching of album art seems to have a positive impact as far as I can see right now. The folder continuously decreases in size while it’s doing the full refresh.
So, now that the scan is done the album metadata folder is 6.8GB large (with Album Art set to Local Files Only). This is completely fine for me.
The only issue I see with this is that Plex effectively killed itself in the upgrade process by filling the disk. Wasn’t that much of an issue for me to fix manually and that’s what beta releases are for.
While that’s generally true, I’d argue that an increase in metadata size of this magnitude without any checks should be considered a fault. I think that ~30GB of space for metadata should not be a limiting factor for 4TB of media files when obvious space eaters like chapter covers are turned off.
The album folder grew by nearly 100% while it was scanning. That’s quite a bit and I think it grants at least some form of checking inside the server. Detecting if free space on the device is low is not a complicated issue and Plex should be easily able to provide the user with a warning instead of just dying or producing untraceable errors due to insufficient space for logging etc.
I’m also cautiously optimistic about this as I have over 100,000 tracks in a library, and I’ve used iTunes as my tag editor on my Mac since forever. I have album artwork already embedded into the track files themselves so Plex doesn’t have to work so hard. I take issue with a simple task of distinguishing Artist names. It’s come to my attention that with the new scanner, it had scanned Dion from Dion and the Belmonts as Celine Dion. The album artwork was correct, but the artist bio, background and poster artwork was of Celine Dion. I had to manually fix the error. Who knows what else might be improperly scanned until I go through everything.
I will perform the write up and submit to Engineering about checking for free space.
Given a lot of distros go for a small root partition (some as small as 30GB now), and the default for Plex is in that root partition (established when the space was much larger by default and libraries weren’t massive as they are now), if one knows they have a large library, why not take the prudent step an just move it out of the root to a place where it has room?
Plex doesn’t know how your system is partitioned (I don’t look).
The installer doesn’t mandate where the APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR goes but I guess I could put it in /home/plexmediaserver (although that creates a logistics & support nightmare) if the root filesystem is under 128 GB allocated.
In the interim while we all figure this out and have time to ingest the results, may I offer:
Question: with a MASSIVE music library, would I be better off starting from scratch with creating a brand new library from scratch rather wait for a conversation to take place? I don’t use Plex for music thoroughly just yet, so waiting a month or two while the new music library renders itself is fine. Thoughts?
Nothing forces you to convert the whole library in one go.
You can let it gradually convert: All the existing items stay as they are, as long as you don’t perform Refresh Metadata on the whole library.
.
Only if you perfrom a Refresh Metadata on an artist or add an album to an existing artist, this artist will get converted.
So you can manually convert artist by artist and see how it’s turning out.
I have been shuffling a playlist on iOS and running the dashboard on the computer. I perform a refresh metadata for the artist that is playing to keep the resources low for the time being. Not ready to refresh the entire library just yet. I did turn off local metadata as instructed by the article and am getting good results. Various Artists (Compilations, Soundtracks, etc.) still seem to give the agents grief though. I am having less luck matching those than non compilations.
I do like that fact that when matching an artist, it now provides a location and year of that artist to help discern artists of the same name.
