Origin of the "Plex Dance"

[beckfield]

@beckfield

@elan

But are you aware that most tag editing tools (Picard, MP3Tag, Puddletag) have settings to allow the Modified time to be preserved when saving tags? So the Modified date/time is not a reliable parameter for determining when tags have been updated.

That’s unfortunate, because the scanner uses heuristics like this to know whether or not files have changed. If it literally had to parse tags for every single file, it would increase scan time easily by a factor of 10x - 100x.

I’m pretty sure those settings are not enabled in my case, so the Plex Dance issue isn’t off the hook yet, but I’ll check tonight.

As it turns out, my tag editors were both set to preserve the modified date of files when tags were edited and saved. So I turned the setting off and repeated my previous experiment. This time, ‘Refresh Metadata’ did not pick up the change, but ‘Scan Library Files’ did.

It will take some more testing to determine if this will be the case for all tags. But if that is the root of all the Plex Dance issues, we should have had this conversation 3 years ago.

The fact that tag editors can be configured to preserve the Modified timestamp is still a challenge.