This is becoming a nuisance now. I update my mp3 files to have to the correct tags. e.g Artist 1 has Album 1 which should have 5 tracks in it. Tracks are all tagged properly with track# etc.
I can refresh, rescan,analyze but plex kept showing me that the aritst had two albums of the same same! with like 4 tracks showing under one album and the two tracks under the other album.
The only plex seemed to refresh its database was when i moved that music folder out of the library folder that plex monitors, empty trash, move the artist folder back and then plex displays the music correctly with all tracks under the same album.
WHY this needs to be done all the time and every time i fix/update tags of my music files? whats the point of the library scan, metadata, analyze and all these tasks that dont seem to do anything?.
Library Scan: Looks for new files that didn’t exist during the last scan. Also looks for modified files since last scan. If modified, checks to see if the name was changed in order to refer to the new filename.
For new files, will attempt to match song filename (based on folder name) against online databases (MusicBrainz?). If that fails, or local metadata is preferred, will examine and pull metadata instead of from online database. Only performs this operation ONCE for “new” files.
Refresh Metadata: For existing files, will check MusicBrainz database for updated info on filenames, authors, release date, etc (metadata). Doesn’t APPEAR to ever look at local again at this point (seems wrong that it doesn’t).
Analyze: Check file technical data, such as bitrate, length, format, etc. Used more often for movies, I think.
The Plex Dance is currently needed the most because the important information in the metadata is only ever pulled on new file discovery. A Plex dance button that FORCES this to happen again, would be great.
When Refresh, Scan, or Analyze don’t do the complete job every time, I consider it a bug. As I’ve said for years, the Plex Dance is a destructive workaround for a series of bugs that should be fixed. Good work was done a couple years ago to greatly reduce the need for the Plex Dance in music libraries, but it was not eliminated. For instance, if any files in an album get renamed, it results in Plex thinking there are two albums of the same name (in this case, the albums can be merged, rather than having to do the Dance, but it shouldn’t happen in the first place).
Maybe it’s time to fix the remaining cases where the dance is still needed. A workaround (especially a destructive workaround) should not be enshrined as a new feature – it should be eliminated.
Exactly! And once I complained to Plex on Twitter that Plex folks never seem to address real reported bugs and they reply with snarky comments to these reported issues.
Guess what? That was responded to by another snark reply stating that what I was saying was incorrect.
What you me tion is the same issues I had, albums split in two and even when I fixed all my tags, library didn’t update without the plex dance.
Can’t be this hard to resolve such simple bugs instead of wasting time on implementing of unnecessary fewtures.
I swear plex has lost its original vision for what it started out to be.
Snark? I admit, I started out writing my post saying such, but admitted within the “refresh metadata” explanation that it appears to not actually refresh local metadata on click, which I feel is incorrect. I submitted as a possible fix for this a simple “dance” button that simulates a complete plex dance would be nice. But a much better option is of course fixing this issue so Refresh Metadata will actually refresh from local data.
I’m sorry I wasn’t clear. I was excited to place my knowledge of the 3 different buttons and their uses (I was confused about what each did, when I arrived) that I come across as condescending.
“Refresh Metadata” does refresh local metadata in all of my music, movie and TV libraries. You have to have the option to read the local metadata enabled, of course, or else it will just use the online sources.
In a music library, you have to be at the artist level, not an an album or track. It will then apply any updated local metadata to all of the albums under that artist. Supplemental info from online sources that your local tags don’t have will also be updated.
The “Scan” function works in a similar fashion. It will use the local metadata as well as the supplemental metadata from online sources if your library is configured to use local metadata on the initial scan. Re-scanning the library won’t update the metadata, as you have pointed out.
Refreshing data doesnt seem to be ding much in this case. I have another case where an album has 13 tracks in total. All tagged correctly, with the correct track#, all in the same folder.
Yet plex is singling out a single track for some reason and shows it under a split album. For the life of me i cant figure out how to fix it other than doing the plex dance again! Now one thing i do notice is that, that one track is mp3 whereas the rest of the tracks are .m4a. Should that cause this issue?
Not sure. but you can select both albums and use the menu choice MERGE to combine them into one album again. If the dance does not fix it, merging them together manually will work out.
If it’s file format-based, it might explain why some of my custom albums I made of various music don’t combine into one entry when loaded in Plex. The files are random collections of songs I put together long ago, that aren’t from the same album, but make more sense combined rather than spread out under a few dozen albums.
