Plex doesn't scan all music sub folders

General Discussions
1

Hi. I’m new to Plex - I run Plex on an Ubuntu headless server mostly to play music etc. After the initial scan of music folders I noticed some subfolders were not included in the scan - I went back and added one of these manually to see if Plex could scan that subfolder, which has many albums in it. Plex added all the albums in the subfolder. So, I guess I’m asking if Plex with scan all subfolders recursively or is there a limit to the number of levels the software will scan. Thanks.

2

Not a limit that I know about. But novice users will often run into issues with how Plex is building a music database out of the folder structure and the embedded metadata.
It is not simply a file/folder scraping, like a regular music player usually does.

I recommend you very much to go with https://support.plex.tv/articles/200265296-adding-music-media-from-folders/, particularly if you enable the library option “Prefer local metadata”.

Along the way there may be lurking some snags which can be avoided with careful organization and tagging. See for instance Why are all my Various Artists albums showing as ‘Bob Marley’, despite being properly tagged? - #7 by OttoKerner

When using any kind of *NIX based server, one must be aware that Plex is usually running under its own, dedicated user account, which doesn’t necessarily have always access permissions to all folders and files.

3

Hi. Thanks for your reply. I read a lot of posts and how-tos - I think part of my problem is I have gathered my music collection over many years - and instead of creating a folder tree of /artist/albums - well I did /artist/albums but there are two directories above these which are /year added/month added/ I didn’t do this for any specific reason it just evolved to this. There are two partitions - one with a main folder of MUSIC1 the other MUSIC2 - all mp3 files are under MUSIC1; flacs are in MUSIC2; I have been using Logitech Media Server for close to 20 years to play and manage my music - but I am looking at Plex because it allows me to stream my music remotely (at some cafe or wherever I might be with an Internet connection). I added the plex user to my ubuntu media server user name group but this doesn’t seem to help. I’ve tried various permissions from read/write/execute everything for everyone (777) to rwx for the user & r-x for group and others. None of this seems to change anything. I suspect the multiple layers of folders might be the problem - but what I know about plex I could recite in less than 60 seconds. My music drives/partitions are mounted at /mnt on the Ubuntu server. I read that Ubuntu (and others) like to keep /media for itself - so to speak. I can change the mount points fairly easily by redoing the fstab file - if that’s a problem. I followed through this Linux Tips - #2 by ChuckPa and I think my set up conforms except for part F where it says

[chuck@lizum ~]$ su
Password:

# change the default permissions to owner='rwx', everyone else to 'r-x' 
#  'x' means to traverse the directory to subdirectories & files
[root@lizum chuck]# find /disks/media3 -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

# change the default permissions to owner= 'rw-',  everyone else 'r-only'
[root@lizum chuck]# find /disks/media3 -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

This is partly because, to get Logitech Media Server to play I had to grant rwx (777) to user/group/others - I tried other schemes but they simply did not work.

Also I’m confused about part F it seems to say two things:

Set permissions to 755 and set permissions to 644

EDIT: OK, so I think this means set directory permissions to 755 and file permissions to 644 - is this correct? I have never set file permissions that I know of - just folder permissions, recursively.

Thanks

PS - I did not check the box for Plex to use local metadata

4

This is correct.

Directories = 755
Files = 644

This is minimum recommended for Plex use.
– You are the owner with full R/W permissions
– Plex can only read the directory and transit through it to a subdirectory
– Plex can only read the files

if you need more relaxed, do what you need.

5

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.