@“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."
I’m not sure the context of that message, but Plex (including Elan) is aware of the issue and working on a solution, as I have mentioned before.
Fantastic and great to hear MovieFan.Plex.
@cayars said:
Fantastic and great to hear MovieFan.Plex.
Yes indeed!
Should be very easy to fix. All the code is there, it’s just a matter of calling it in the correct way.
@MovieFan.Plex said:
@“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."I’m not sure the context of that message, but Plex (including Elan) is aware of the issue and working on a solution, as I have mentioned before.
Great, thanks for the update.
any news on this? I mean, it’s been over half a year ago… I don’t like dancing my entire 1T worth of music back and forth. Takes some time, you know. 
@dreagan_luna said:
any news on this? I mean, it’s been over half a year ago… I don’t like dancing my entire 1T worth of music back and forth. Takes some time, you know.
Nope, not a word. You’d think a data-destructive problem would get some priority, but it doesn’t seem so.
meh, bummer
Yes, it’s part of a growing disappointment in Plex for me. As some others have announced, I’ve been investigating Emby. They’ve come a long way since the last time I tried them out, and there doesn’t appear to be an “Emby Dance” issue. They’ve caught up with Plex in a number of other ways as well. They’ve come so far, in fact, that I invested in a lifetime Emby Premiere membership, and am in the process of getting my Emby server in shape to replace Plex. I’m about done with waiting years for bug fixes that could have, and should have, been addressed in days.
@beckfield said:
Yes, it’s part of a growing disappointment in Plex for me. As some others have announced, I’ve been investigating Emby. They’ve come a long way since the last time I tried them out, and there doesn’t appear to be an “Emby Dance” issue. They’ve caught up with Plex in a number of other ways as well. They’ve come so far, in fact, that I invested in a lifetime Emby Premiere membership, and am in the process of getting my Emby server in shape to replace Plex. I’m about done with waiting years for bug fixes that could have, and should have, been addressed in days.
What exactly is tagging those two going to accomplish?
Let me answer that for you: nothing.
@danjames92 said:
What exactly is tagging those two going to accomplish?Let me answer that for you: nothing.
What does it matter to you?
Several new items added to the list of problems that require the Plex Dance to resolve.
So many similar discussions, it’s amazing that the Plex guys haven’t just figured out that not having the ability to ‘force refresh’ (i.e., plex dance) a show or set of shows, is most definitely a bug.
See also: Why is the 'Plex Dance' even a thing?
Thanks to @beckfield for compiling this list of issues!
We’re in the (long) progress of working on some awesome general scanning and metadata upgrades, and I promise we’ll discuss the Plex Dance as part of it.
Just to give a bit of an Origin Story on the Plex Dance, when I was first designing the library system, I decided that the scanner owned the “critical hints” for a media file—essentially, the key bits of data which identified an item (e.g. show/S/E for an episode, or artist/album/track number for a track).
The agents, on the other hand, owned everything else outside of these critical hints, because it was confusing if they could actually change the identity of things. So the local media agent can control a lot of metadata, but they can’t change the critical set of hints which identify an item (because it would confuse the scanner).
Anyway, long story short to say it really seemed like a good idea at the time…
Thank you. I’m sure it is a long task. We were told over a year ago that you were working on a solution. Glad to hear you’re still at it.
And it may have worked, if the scanner were smart enough to recognize changes in the bits that it was responsible for without having to remove the media and put it back. Then you could have provided instructions to use ‘Scan Library Files’ to recognize changes in those bits, and ‘Refresh Metadata’ for everything else. That would have been at least non-destructive.
Anyway, thanks for the update. I’ll look forward to seeing what you come up with.
And it may have worked, if the scanner were smart enough to recognize changes in the bits that it was responsible for without having to remove the media and put it back.
The scanner should see changes in the critical hints, as long as the file times are updated (e.g. tags in audio files). Maybe there’s some nuance I’m missing here?
Thanks for the response, and glad to hear you guys are addressing this - look forward to seeing it feed through in the betas.
This was not the case with embedded metadata. At least for video files the last time I checked. You would need to force it by either rename or moving out file to a different location.
There’s no nuance - it simply doesn’t work (I’m assuming that by “scanner,” you mean the ‘Scan Library Files’ command, and by ‘agents,’ you refer to the ‘Refresh Metadata’ command). This is what I, and all those threads I listed, have been saying for the past 3+ years.
For yet another demonstration, I just did the following, using the album “Debussy Rediscovered”:
The next thing to do (which I know will work, but don’t want to bother with) is the Plex Dance. Whether it was the scanner or the agent, at least one of those steps should have updated the track titles in Plex, but they didn’t.
While the Refresh All Metadata command was running, I noticed the little popups saying it had finished processing an unfamiliar album name. This led me to discover that the process I just went through had messed up a box set that had been organized correctly.
This is a box set of all Mozart symphonies. I have verified via Puddletag that the album title (TALB), Performer (TPE1), Band/Orchestra/Acc., and (TPE2) are all identical, and disc numbers (TPOS), track numbers (TRCK) are correct. They are in a folder named “The Complete Mozart Symphonies.”
Plex, somehow, decided to split this 11-CD set into two albums. One album, which Plex incorrectly titles “The Complete 50 Symphonies (Volume 8)” (this title appears nowhere in the folder name or metadata), contains tracks that belong on various discs from the set. The second album, which Plex correctly titles “The Complete Mozart Symphonies,” is missing discs 1, 3, 9, and 11. I’ll probably have to Plex Dance this set to correct this problem. (EDIT: Plex Dance did indeed correct the problem)
Plex also fails to use available album.jpg, folder.jpg, or cover.jpg files.
