Scanning music library takes ages!

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Server Version#: 1.16.0.1226
Player Version#: Web player?

I bought plex premium which I to try for a month and keep it if it works well. Although I like the extra features. It just has been scanning my music for 4 days already. I tracked the “alerts” today. It scanned alphabetically but not all artists just a couple. Later when I looked this night it scanned the same artists again…

The library consists of almost 20000 songs. largest folder would be about 200 songs. Part of my library is neatly organized in artist with their music in the folder. I decided to not create folders for albums because I wanted to download complete artists at once, this prevents me from having tons of duplicates.

After a day or so it found all my music, the artist nor album count wasn’t increasing anymore at least. After that it has been scanning for metadata.

There was a update released while it was searching for metadata. After I stopped the scan today (because it was scanning the same artists again) I decided to install the update, after this I looked for new metadata, and it started scanning my folders. In alerts it stops after a folder. However, when I go to the “console” tab I can see it scanning gracenote for metadata.

Any help please why this is taking so long? When it still logged in the “alerts” tab it took about 15 seconds to find the metadata for a album/artist. My database is located on a SSD but my library is located on a array of disks (ZFS because I am on unRaid). Plex is running inside the binhex docker container. I already ran database optimization.

Thanks in advance!

edit:
Just noticed it continued to scan folders in the “alerts” tab.
Also I don’t use embedded tags, this probably causes the metadata to load longer, however all my songs are properly tagged, I sort of hoped it would add one song to multiple albums if it exists in multiple albums.

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I just redid my music lib and have 660 artist with 73000 tracks it take a long, long time. I restarted the PMS 2x a day so that it would stop getting stuck and it finally completed about 3-4 days later. It takes even longer if you are adding/updating other media at the same time.

You can also temporarily turn off the auto media scanning that should help

3

If I may make a suggestion?

I break my music into blocks by Artist (first letter).
This layer, above the actual music is not a concern to PMS.

/music/A-H/Abba/

is one example of structure.

Now, to create the library,

  • Add only one ‘Group’ folder at a time.

  • Optimize the database when it finishes

  • EDIT the library section and add the next group.

  • One final Optimize when all are done.

    It actually works faster this way.

4

I have 3238 artist and 8487 albums, I made sure I did not include any music I downloaded years ago from youtube. It’s now refreshing all metadata which is a lot faster than it was doing during the initial scan, about 20-30 albums/artists per minute.

I did turn off auto scanning yesterday after I stopped the initial scan.
Also I didn’t download new music although I really wanted to :frowning:

Fortunately I can use the plex mix feature now for sonos, although not for all songs. I think it still needs to find metadata for these songs.

EDIT
After stopping the scan and refresh all metadata it found all metadata in about 30 hours…

5

This kind of library wouldn’t really work for me, my family members can download music and it’s automatically placed in the folder /music/music/[artist]/[artist] - [song_title].mp3
The songs contain these tags: Title, Artist, Album, Cover, Track number, Disk Number, Genre, Year, Album Artist, Date, ISCR, Length, BPM and Label
Normally the docker automatically turns off at 5 in the morning for backups after which it turns on again.

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