When I add music to one of the watched folders for one of my Music libraries it will inexplicably (to me) rescan folders/albums that should be unchanged from the previous scan however I see in alerts that the metadata is being rematched/redownloaded for hundreds of albums, and the console starts to add entries like
Due to the size of these folders this can have the drives spinning for upwards of 30 minutes, which isn’t horrible, but also probably unnecessary and I’m assuming I can resolve somehow. Nothing is showing up “unmatched” in the LIbrary when I use that filter, I do know that much. I have taken the time to properly tag everything before adding it to the watched/active folders so lean on Personal Music by default on these libraries if that makes any difference.
Any guidance here? Happy to provide any additional information / context that might be helpful.
I will do my best to try and single out those where this is happening. These are live Grateful Dead recordings etc. They will not be making it into Musicbrainz anytime soon unfortunately (hence, DIY tagging - I am equally fussy but the overlap probably doesn’t apply in this niche)
Sorry if flogging a dead horse but, ended up having to wipe the old library and reimport everything with the scanners set that way in order to get the Fix Match to work on the albums
Question, can I match the artist to Plex Music and not “break things” or will it try to match the child albums after I make that connection? Obviously trying to prevent going back to the long-scans but want to take advantage of helpful metadata where possible.
The same cascading “There was a change!” and updates going down the entire directory structure.
I have created a new library fresh. Prefer local metadata / store progress are checked, related content, bios, reviews, popular tracks, and concerts are unchecked.
Embedded Tags, Local Files Only, Plex Music Scanner for the dropdowns
Assuming if I follow these steps no link will be made to try and reference anything “externally” from the cloud or anywhere else for metadata inside this singular library?
adding a few thousand entries to mbz just to appease plex seems weird, can we just fix the agents so local means local and that’s it? i’m not sure why having that as standard functionality seems like a difficult conversation
end users shouldn’t have any input on the software? interesting attitude.
it sounds like this is something that affects multiple people, isn’t the point of these forums to find help / help others / offer suggestions or did I miss something?
So we’ve established that you’re seeing a refresh of the artist when a new album gets added. A few thoughts:
This should be relatively cheap (but can take time). It’s reading tags from media files, asking for new online metadata in at least some cases, etc.
In the 0th case (adding first album) clearly you want it to happen. It can be nice in the Nth case (low N) because artist metadata can change/improve over time.
In the Mth case (high M) I can see it being annoying (and we actually have a special case to avoid doing for Various Artists.
Awesome, definitely makes sense from the VA perspective, and I completely appreciate having 30 years of live recordings of a handful of artists is more of the archivist persuasion than the casual music listener but:
#1 Storage is cheap #2 Batch tagging files is easy in the 21st century #3 Most people who are maintaining their own collections are probably taking care of #2 to some degree
Appreciate the response from you on this, I have been wanting to make this work in Plex for the longest time and love that it feels like there’s a new fire around development and innovation there (Live TV/DVR, Plexamp, etc.) and music is really the cornerstone of my media center experience.
Happy to chat more, hopefully I’ve described the use-case in enough detail for starters, feel free to reach out here or via PM or whatever is easiest if there is additional information I can provide, or there’s a workaround I should be aware of.
Out of curiosity, how many albums are under each of these albums? Just trying to get a sense.
Given that we also do a monthly rolling refresh at night/scheduled, it’s less important to refresh artist + peer albums whenever a new album is added, so I’d even be willing to consider special-casing things for the 0 ⇢ 1 case, unless I’m missing something
between 500-600 multiplied by 15-20ish tracks per album
mind you if i have the entire live music archive i have loaded into that library (it’s spread across a handful of folders) this ends up being ~1500 albums, so we’re talking what looked like ~1.2TB of reads each time i add a single folder given the PlexDash numbers before I nuked it this morning because I had to try something
Even with fast drives, it’s loud and long, and since nothing really changed probably mostly unnecessary
Ideally if I could apply that “special scenario” to that at the Library level that would do the trick, doing it at the artist level seems way too granular. We know the library is big and we know it’s going to be high M across the board, no sense in picking and choosing (and probably introducing a mess into the Butler/scanner world) That’s my thoughts here, feedback definitely welcome.
if you have a ton of stuff that is not/will not ever be on MBZ, it might be good to consider putting that in a separate library (kind of like classical, audiobooks, etc).
With all that non matching music separated off from the main collection, you can potentially avoid something in one library from causing rescans of another.
Assuming that would even work, I’m not entirely sure that plex wouldn’t store and update the matching across multiple libraries.
In that case, the other alternative is scale out to a separate server instance (virtualized or otherwise).
The same applies to extremely large video libraries, where scanning of one library takes soo long it blocks other library updates for inconvenient periods of time. Scaling out at the server level is not as bad as before, with UNO you can pin libraries from any server, so it doesn’t much matter if one had a dedicated server each for TV, movies, and music.
Not saying that is the best or even acceptable work-around for this particular issue.
Appreciate it. If you want deeper detail on the FS layout or how tags are being utilized in the files I’m happy to provide but yes it’s a lot of io for negligible changes
