One FLAC album not added by Plex scanner. Metadata issue?

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
1

Server Version#: 1.40.2.8395-c67dce28e
Player Version#: N/A

TLDR

I use Plex server and Plexamp as my primary solution for listening to music. I recently got a new album as a WAV download, converted the tracks to flac, and added it to the music directory on my Linux NAS Plex server. Despite many attempts, I can’t get the media scanner to find this album.

Based on the server logs, it looks like PMS sees and recognizes these files correctly. They just don’t appear in my library after the scan.

A few things I’ve tried:

I know that filesystem permissions and ownership are a common reason for the scanner to fail to find files, and I’ve dealt with this issue many times in the past. I tried changing the ownership and permissions of these flac files and the directories containing them. Even if the owner, group, and permissions of these files and directories (including extended permissions i.e. setfacl) are identical to those of another FLAC album that Plex handles correctly, this album isn’t recognized.

I tried re-encoding the FLACs with 16 bit depth instead of 24 bit depth. I tried encoding them using both the flac command line tool and ffmpeg. This didn’t make any difference.

I read somewhere that Plex might have trouble handling FLAC audio with more than 2 channels. I confirmed that these files are all just 2-channel stereo L+R.

I tried encoding an mp3 file for one of the tracks and leaving this mp3 in the same album directory with the same filesystem permissions. I ran the scanner again and Plex immediately found this one mp3, but still couldn’t handle any of the FLACs.

I found some results about flac discnumber metadata being weird, for example this forum thread. This could be relevant because the album I’m having trouble with is 2 discs. However, that thread says it should work as long as the discnumber metadata field is not all uppercase.

The flac files can be played from by VLC with no issues from the same directory. The metadata can be edited by mp3tag and can be printed with command line tools like ffprobe, media_info, and metaflac.

Logs

metaflac output – uploaded to google drive because it’s 14MB. I think it includes a hex dump of the cover art.

cindy_lee_diamond_jubilee_track_01_mediainfo.txt (1.6 KB)
Plex Media Scanner Analysis.log (4.5 KB)
Plex Media Scanner Matcher.log (21.3 KB)
cindy_lee_diamond_jubilee_track_01_ffprobe.txt (2.2 KB)

2

Remove the cover art from the audio files and try again.
Save the cover as cover.jpg into the same folder.

Don’t forget the ALBUMARTIST meta tag.

Use a folder structure like in here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200265296-adding-music-media-from-folders/

And make sure that every track in every album which is stored inside the same Artist folder is tagged with the exact same content in the ALBUMARTIST tag.
(If there are single tracks with guest performers, use the regular ARTIST tag to note their presence.)

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3

Removing the album art didn’t have any effect. But I was able to fix the problem by modifying the filenames and directory structure exactly as specified here in the “Multi-Disc albums” section.

Previously I had this:

/Artist
    /Album
        /Disc 1
            /01 - Title of Disc 1 Track 1.flac
            /02 - Title of Disc 1 Track 2.flac
            ...
        /Disc 2
            /01 - Title of Disc 2 Track 1.flac
            ...

After modifying it to look as follows, the scanner was able to load the album into my library:

/Artist
    /Album
        /101 - Title of Disc 1 Track 1.flac
        /102 - Title of Disc 1 Track 2.flac
        ...
        /201 - Title of Disc 2 Track 1.flac
        ...

Thanks very much for the help!

I have plenty of other albums (both flac and mp3) organized using a separate subdir for each disc within the album dir. I’m not sure why changing that structure was necessary in the case of this album. But I guess it doesn’t really matter now that the problem is fixed.

4

I am doing the same.

It was probably just the act of renaming, which triggered a correct scan.
A Plex Dance “light” would’ve done the same, I reckon.

1 Like
5

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