Server Version#: 1.19.3.2852
Player Version#: Plex Web 4.30.2
I just did the “Update to Plex Music” for my music collection. Was reading up on things and it said there would be some new options in Library Edit area, so I went looking. It’s been a LONG time since I had set things up, so I really don’t recall what is new and what is not in the settings.
In any case, in the Advanced area of my Music Library, I came across a setting for scanner. Did some research and found out what it is. During that research, the Information page indicated that there is only ONE SCANNER for music, and that is called Plex Music Scanner, what else would it be called, duh!
Well, in light of my new found information, I found that I actually have 2 scanners available to select from, Plex Music and Plex Music Scanner, as seen in this image:
“Plex music agent” is the new generation but you need to be careful, if you have music compilations track or incomplete metadata tracks all your songs will be put in a big “various artist” folder, because new agent works with “album” criteria to categorize your library.
"Plex music scanner " the old one. Works fine if you have manually put all metadata in your tracks or if you have almost completed. You need to have, artist name, song name, album name, album artist and track number at least.
While the majority of my stuff is tagged properly, I have a couple folders full of things that still need to be processed and tagged that were in my mix of music. Things are just a bit hosed now, to put it mildly. Unfortunately, even a large chunk of the music that is tagged properly are screwed up now.
I’m even having problems with Plex getting “stuck” now when scanning my music library. It hits a certain point and just stays there, for hours, maxing out the CPU and memory on my Synology NAS. What a mess!
I would like to avoid this album grouping as I have just a bunch of singles in a library, and don’t want to have any type of album grouping, so i should choose “Plex Music Scanner” as scanner and “Personal Media Artists” as the agent?
In my experience the new “Plex Music” one is utterly broken. If I scan my library with that I end up thousands of tracks all under one, random, artist and other tracks in albums that they have no association with at all.
The Plex Music Scanner doesn’t appear to read the embedded album art from the tracks at all though so I need to see why that is. However, matching the albums in Plex after they’re been scanned does usually cause the right artwork to then show. Where it’s got that from though, I couldn’t say.
Still the same experience here. I ended up going back the old Plex Music Scanner, which is where I have remained since my initial posting. I do manually use the new Plex Music on some of my newer stuff, as it seems to identify my new music better, but for the old stuff I have, it’s still seems to be a disaster.
I certainly won’t let it run rampant again, I spent a couple weeks straightening out my library after it demolished my library by doing the “conversion”. Wasted way too much time fixing things to even chance that it happens again…
