Server Version#: 1.29.0.6244
Player Version#: 9.9.0.35519; nVidea Shield 9.1.0 (33.2.0.125)
After multiple attempts over the past year to get Plex Music to display music files like my other music servers, I finally succeeded in general yesterday. When I tried to play Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Johnny Mercer Songbook this morning, I noticed that the display on my TV screen did not show any of the songs from that album. After opening Plex on my Mac mini, I noticed that the songs appeared, but they were displayed in the wrong order and with incorrect numbering (0-12 instead of 1-13). In addition, all of the metadata was missing. I deleted those files from the NAS, performed the usual troubleshooting exercises for the Plex Dance, copied the files back onto the NAS, and scanned the files. The album does not appear in my music library. Here are some screenshots.
According to the Plex screenshot, my library contains 452 albums. Please explain why I need special permission for one additional album. What kind of permission is needed? Thank you.
Hi. As far as I am able to determine, my permissions are correct. FYI, I just changed Plex’s permission from “read/write” to “read only,” but that did not make my missing music album reappear. While I greatly appreciate your efforts to help, I must ask you again to explain how any error in my permissions can affect only one music album because that does not seem logical to me. Here’s some additional information about my files.
In relevant part, my MEDIA folder is subdivided into Movies, Television Shows, and Music for Streaming. I have more than 800 films in my movie collection and 115 TV shows in my TV collection. I don’t have any problems watching those videos or adding new videos to those collections. I have not checked to see whether all 452 of my music albums are working properly in Plex, but verified that all of my newer albums are working properly. I bought that Ella Fitzgerald album 5 to 6 years ago. I have been using Plex for my video collections for that last four to five years.
Did you Apply to this folder, sub-folders and files ?
If you didn’t then you did not force DSM to apply (fix) permissions for anything further down deeper.
Linux is extremely strict.
I can grant permission to Plex for everything in a shared folder
-BUT-
I can reach into a folder, drop in a music album with the wrong permissions (because I pushed them over SMB / NFS), and PMS won’t be able to read them.
First, I changed Plex’s permission back to read/write in PlexMediaServer because I have the same permission in Media Files. Second, I have not activated either the Advanced Share Permissions or the NFS Permissions for PlexMediaServer or Media Files because I have no idea what those permissions do.
A few days ago, after learning that I can force Plex to use my metadata for music files, I decided to try Plex again for music. I deleted all of the music files from the NAS and then reinstalled them because during the past year or so, I had changed the metadata in a lot of my music files via Apple Music. I want the music files on my NAS to be the same as those in my Apple Music collection. This is the reason I cannot understand why that one file is misbehaving. For the record, this problem originated more than a year ago. After finding a problem with the metadata for this album, I deleted the album from the NAS. After reinstalling the files, I could not find the album on Plex, but it appears on my iFi Zen Stream.
Lets say you have volume1/music/The Beatles/Abbey Road and in that directory 01 - Come Together.mp3
And you have: volume1/music/The Beatles/Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and in that directory 01 - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.mp3
If the permissions on /Abbey Road block plex from accessing that directory the contents cannot be indexed, while the permissions on /Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band allow plex to scan and play it.
As ChuckPa has said Linux is very strict on this, and it is the root cause for this type of issue a significant percentage of the time.
Plex does not see the FLAC files either. FYI, I purchased this album from HDtracks and added all of the metadata, except for the Title and Extension. Today, I used dBpoweramp to convert the AIFF files to uncompressed FLAC files.
Let me repeat. The crappy internal software on my iFi Zen Stream can see this album on the NAS and play those files. Audirvana can see this album on the SSD that is attached to my Mac mini. Also, I forced Plex to use my metadata. When I let Plex do its own thing, my albums were totally out of order. Some albums were sorted by the artist’s first name. Some were sorted by the artist’s last name. My artist folders are organized last name, first name.
The quirk that was driving me nuts a year ago is the way various music players sometimes handle punctuation marks in the metadata. If you look at song 05, you will see a reference to the film, Blues in the Night. This film title should be displayed as “Blues in the Night” rather than Blues in the Night. Sometimes, Plex displays quotation marks as quotation marks. Sometimes, Plex displays quotation marks as underlines. To the best of my memory, Audirvana and Apple Music always display quotation marks as quotation marks.
The only thing I can add to this MIGHT be the naming.
I say “might” because when we use parentheses with dates for movies or episodes, we don’t put any other text component, e.g “(1964)”
We hide all the descriptive text within the [Hide other descriptive info here]
How are your other media files named ?
Regarding the quotation marks - I can’t speak to this. I’m the platform/OS guy and not an app engineer.
I will ask one of them to take a look at what you’ve shared here and see if anything jumps out.
I think I finally understand your point, but doubt it has anything to do with me. I have a shared folder Media, which holds my movies, television shows, and music albums. Everything in that shared folder has the same permissions. I can’t imagine why anyone would want separate permissions for each album, but to each his own. Thanks.
Its not a matter of wanting different permissions, Linux treats every folder/directory that way. If you copied the files down what ever program you are using to do that might set its own permissions (and as a side effect, may make you the owner of that folder).
Do other albums from the same artist show up? if so, go to that folder and make sure you press Apply to this folder, sub-folders and files when you edit/save those permissions, that will go back thru and fix any bad permissions
If you look at my original entry, you will see a bunch of my Ella Fitzgerald albums. Some of the hi-res albums end with [24_192]. When I entered this data in iTunes or Apple Music, I actually typed [24/192]. Apple properly displays what I typed when I play a file, but changes that information in the music folders. From what I understand, databases prohibit the use of specified symbols in their naming convention, but what is permissible in Apple’s naming convention might violate Synology’s naming convention. I hope that “database” is the proper term for what I am attempting to describe. In any event, what drives me nuts is typing the same thing each time, but getting different results.
What the database allows in a Text (descriptive) field can be almost anything.
These fields are usually any of the ASCII character set except for the control characters from (1 - 31 decimal).
Before going for an eye exam this morning, I decided to play an album via Plex and the nVidia Shield on my TV. All of the songs were missing on this album, so I started looking at the rest of my albums. By the time I got to “M”, I had found a lot of albums with missing songs, misnumbered songs, or with the artist’s name where the song title should be. A few minutes ago, I looked at the albums as shown on my Mac mini. In some cases, the songs are there. When I’m using Plex on the Mac, I also am using PMS on the NAS.
I compressed one of the files, but the zipped file is 248.2 MB, which greatly exceeds the 30 MB limit for uploading.
On the music screen under Edit Music, I checked the box for “Prefer Local Metadata” and left the other settings alone.
In the main Settings screen under Agents, Local Media Assets (artists) and Local Media Assets (albums) are highlighted in Blue. Personal Media Artists and Personal Media Albums are checked in gray. However, the order of the latter settings is inconsistent. Personal Media Albums is on top, while Personal Media Artists is on the bottom.
Unfortunately, I am not certain what you mean by “pristine” tags. Whatever I did for years with iTunes works with Apple Music and Audirvana. It also worked with Amarra. If I switch to Roon, I won’t have to add my own metadata, which would be nice if I were buying a lot of new music. Here’s the problem. I’m 71 years old and not going to spend my final days maintaining two or more sets of music files. The only thing I dislike about Audirvana is that Damien’s people replaced an iPad app which displayed in a single screen all the information I want to see and replaced it with an iPad app that requires me to toggle between two screens to see most of this information. In fact, this new app works even worse with the upgraded Audirvana software.
If your tags aren’t accurate, you can run into a lot of the issues you’re mentioning. Making a library without that setting enabled can be a much better choice, and is only intended for when you know you have perfect tags.
