Picking "Scan Library Files" for my music library causes lots of tracks to lose their title

[GuyGizmo]

Server Version#: 1.19.4.2935

I’ve added music I’ve personally created to my Plex library. Since these are personal and not commercially available tracks, when I added them their ID3 tags were used for metadata.

Everything was fine until today when I picked “Scan Library Files” for my music library. After it was done scanning, it trashed the titles of about half of my tracks.

A picture is worth a thousand words. It went from this:

To this:

Only music I made is affected for some reason. And not all of it, only about half of it.

I restored my Plex database from a backup created a few hours ago and tried again, and got the same result. I also tried locking the titles of all of these tracks, but they still get trashed after my music library is manually scanned.

Strangely, the tracks still sort to the right place if I tell the Plex web app to display all of the tracks in my music library and sort by title. But the titles are blank.

Fortunately, dropping a file into one of the folders included in my music library causes it to be added to the library without triggering this problem. Only doing a manual scan triggers it.

In case it helps track down what’s going wrong, here are my server’s logs from before starting a manual scan of my music library:

Plex Media Server Logs_2020-06-26_15-35-45 (before).zip (1.6 MB)

… and here are the logs from afterwards:

Plex Media Server Logs_2020-06-26_15-36-44 (after).zip (1.8 MB)

I can work around the issue for now, but if I ever have to do a manual scan it’ll seriously mess up a lot of the metadata for tracks that are of great personal significance to me! I hope this can be fixed soon.

In case there’s any more diagnostics I can do, I’m willing to perform another manual scan since I can restore my library’s database from a backup to undo the damage.

[GuyGizmo]

Well it turns out that avoiding a manual scan doesn’t actually help. All of the metadata on these tracks got blown away again. There’s nothing I can do to prevent it. If I go in and manually re-enter the track titles, it just gets blown away again the next time there’s a manual scan or Plex does routine maintenance or I add another track or something. I cannot keep the title on these tracks from becoming blank!

Please help!

[GuyGizmo]

Okay, I think I’ve got the issue fixed. I copied all of the files out of my Plex library, cleaned up their ID3v2 tags, deleted all the broken albums from my library in Plex web, and then copied them back in again. Now the track titles seem to be stable again. Hopefully it’ll stay that way.

[customswolf]

I have exactly the same problem. Large numbers of audio books or radio plays, all with ID3 tags. Suddenly in the past month, the files lose their track titles. The artist, album artist and album data all remains, but the title field is wiped.

I’ve created new music libraries to test, and within a week, the titles are scrubbed again, but only for certain songs. The common denominators that they’re all homemade files that don’t match online databases.

This makes Plex unusable for music for me. Is this a known bug that’s being worked on?

[GuyGizmo]

The Plex devs will have to comment on it being worked on of course, but, not to be too much of a pessimist, this seems to be a rare bug that affects a very small number of users. Historically that hasn’t boded well for a quick fix.

You can try doing the same thing I did, which is:

1. Copy the affected music files out of your Plex library
2. Select them all in Plex’s web UI and delete them from there
3. Empty trash / Clean bundles for your music library to make sure old metadata for the tracks is erased
4. Use an ID3 tag editor to edit and rewrite the tags
5. Add them back into the library.

Once I did that, all of the titles on my tracks consistently stuck around. I think I used MusicBrainz Picard to edit and re-save all of my music’s tags. And theories as to why it worked: it normalized the tags on the files – I’m not sure what kind of tags they had previously but I made sure they were standard IDEv2 tags afterwards – and also, that probably changed the hash of the file, causing Plex to scan it into the library as a new file and reimport it from scratch. Someone more familiar with the inner workings of Plex would have to comment as to whether or not I’m on the mark here.

Of course, if you have an immense amount of music that’s affected by this then that may not be a reasonable option. For me it was only a few albums of my personal music that was affected, so it wasn’t too onerous to do what I did.

[customswolf]

Hmmm. I’ve got over 500 albums that fall prey to this bug, so I’m loathe to do that amount of editing unless I have to. I might experiment with one or two artists first.

What I don’t get is why it affects a complete new library, scanned from scratch.
All the albums are created in itunes, so the id3 tags should be consistent, you’d think.

I’d still like to hear from Plex if this is a known bug…