lol… no, no… I don’t want to rename it. I was thinking more like added feature. I mean, we have update/refresh… why not purge. The fact that we CANNOT remove items from libraries without removing from the paths is just a pain in the a**.
New feature requests should go in new threads in the Feature Request Voting forum. It won’t get much attention if you tack it onto an existing thread.
Yes, yes… I was just adding a little more from my first post. I too feel you pain. I can’t stand having to remove content from libraries only to add it back to get it to work. There should be no reason why PMS can’t actually rescan an item and recollect all information (internal & external).
@NewPlaza said:
lol… no, no… I don’t want to rename it. I was thinking more like added feature. I mean, we have update/refresh… why not purge. The fact that we CANNOT remove items from libraries without removing from the paths is just a pain in the a**.
Call it anything to stop the rants
@don.alcombright said:
Has Plex ever considered allowing for exporting meta-data as well? Based on the last roundtables, one thing @elan mentioned was that people should be just editing in plex for issues found.
Hi guys,
this is what I am waiting for. Use the data that I changed in Plex itself (assembled from various sources) to modify / overwrite the somehow far-from-perfect current metadata of my Premium Music library.
I’d be happy to have it as third party channel or something since I know that Plex itself is reluctant to modify my data.
Thank you for listening.
Oh, my two cents to the debate.
If in some distant future, the “rescan” of metadata can be used and causes also a new reload of the agent sources, then what the current “Refresh” functionality would be good for? I see no advantage, so it can be replaced IMO.
Cheers,
rossinior
Here’s another user having to use the Plex Dance to do what Refresh should be doing.
It’s even out on Reddit, where someone found another workaround for the Refresh bug.
And another.
This thread seems to be the earliest post where the name ‘plex dance’ appears.
All this time I thought your question was figurative. Doing some searching I wonder if I might have coined the term. It’s a few days earlier than Otto’s comment. 
In my defense, I wasn’t even a ninja yet at the time. Anything I may have said was of my own free will and not representative of Plex or it’s employees. 
No, I’m really looking for the origins. Mostly I’m looking for the origin of the process, not the name. I’d like to find the earliest thread where the process was suggested, even before the name was coined.
Plex is duly indemnified from complicity with the shenanigans of your wilder days. 
Although it’s good to know that, now that you are an employee, you no longer have free will.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t come up with the steps. I did find this older post with the steps listed in the proper order. Not sure what led to it.
I know I was one of the early people to do the “dance” but that was back under my old username. Of course I didn’t call it the “Plex Dance” but probably something with at least one 4 letter word in it.
I don’t recall but think I read it as a tip someone else had posted and maybe even Elan had said to try it as a test or diagnostic or something like that. If I were to guess I’d say it probably came from an employee at some part in time to help figure out an agent issue. But that’s just a guess.
I’m of no help, but I doubt it was me. Surely not the name “Plex Dance” either.
@beckfield might be hard to find with the transfer of forums, don’t know. Personally I’m amazed we still have to do this, but that’s for another thread. 
@cayars said:
@beckfield might be hard to find with the transfer of forums, don’t know.
No worries, just a point of curiosity, mostly.
Personally I’m amazed we still have to do this, but that’s for another thread.
No, that’s pretty much what this thread is all about, and happy to keep it alive.
@cayars said:
Personally I’m amazed we still have to do this, but that’s for another thread.
@beckfield said:
No, that’s pretty much what this thread is all about, and happy to keep it alive.
Oh I know. Just my subtle way of acknowledging things and jumping in to keep momentum going.
Maybe we should start a raffle/pool (even if just for fun) to see who can guess when they will fix this. 
Well, I have some duplicate music, demonstrated here: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/263240/duplicate-songs-in-library#latest
And the Plex Dance, is the only way I can fix it. As I discover duplicates, dancing I go. PIA
iTunes at least gives me a duplicates option so I can clean up my library or delete actual duplicate files. ITunes also uses the metadata, which allows me to edit it and clean it up easily before Plex scans it.
Elan, reached out by PM, and says " We’ve repeatedly asked for cases where this “dance” would be needed, because we’d love to fix those bugs."
Tons of samples here in the forum both with music and video files. Want to create with a movie?
Grab a movie in windows. Right click in Explorer and put in a title (make it bogus). Now add this to your library.
After scanning just to clearly show issue right click in explorer and remove title attribute.
So for example file name “Top Gun (1986)” contains embedded title of “Top Gun by Carlo”. When scanned it will use the title of “Top Gun by Carlo” but will successfully pull all other info for Top Gun including actors, dates, etc. Now edit the file and remove “Top Gun by Carlo” from the file’s meta-data and REFRESH file in your library. It will not properly fetch and set the title to “Top Gun” but will stay “Top Gun by Carlo” which is now incorrect. PLEX DANCE and it now gets the correct meta-data.
Thanks a forced way to show the issue. But in a nutshell when a manual REFRESH is done on a file the process should:
- remove all current meta-data UNLESS it’s locked by the user.
- Fetch new meta-data as usual
- Save all new meta-data except LOCKED fields.
Done and fixed.
PS example above assumes you have active agent for pulling from local files.
@“Frank Logan” said:
Elan, reached out by PM, and says " We’ve repeatedly asked for cases where this “dance” would be needed, because we’d love to fix those bugs."
Well that pisses me off just a little bit, because @Elan knows damn well about this very thread, and the post back on page 2 where I link to over 20 threads where the Plex Dance was the solution to work around a bug. Plus, I mentioned it in the last round table conference, where both Elan and @kinoCharlino were involved in the conversation. If after all that he somehow still doesn’t know about it, there have been Plex employees involved in this thread that should have told him about it.
I’ve explained it before also as well as others.
Personally I’m not worried about past history if they are willing to fix it now.
Help they want, help they get. Fix we want, fix we get. 
I strongly agree with the basic premise that Plex badly needs to fix the metadata refresh problems that require users to use the Plex Dance.
My experience, detailed here: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/255316/plex-movie-agent-will-not-pull-metadata-from-imdb-for-existing-library-items
In my case, the issue was: I changed my movies library to start using IMDb as a ratings source. But after doing this, it only applies to new items added to the library- existing items will not change their rating source, even when forcing a metadata refresh. Who would want this behavior? More importantly, who would _expect _this behavior?
@crafty35a said:
I strongly agree with the basic premise that badly Plex needs to fix the metadata refresh problems that require users to use the Plex Dance.My experience, detailed here: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/255316/plex-movie-agent-will-not-pull-metadata-from-imdb-for-existing-library-items
Added to the list.
