Greetings, I have a large collection of music locally, in order to have new content show up on server, the whole massive library has to be scanned, almost 40k albums, 350k tracks. The workaround for this so far is “micro-manage” like third party solution like autoscan. There is only one parent folder in my library however, when there is new new content detected, the whole shebang will be scanned, including those existing plex albums that have absolutely no changes, may be there is a way to skip over, I just can’t work around it. Unless I cut my library and folderize’em according to years and subsequently add folders for each year inside plex library, then I can utilise the partial scan feature, say Taylor Swift releases a new album in 2022, then only the 2022 folder will be scanned, not the whole music folder. That’s way out of my league however. I tried cutting up into separate libraries, no avail, I still have to rely on periodic scan, daily in my case because the third party solution’s partial scan would leave out some albums. This method still can’t bypass the problem of the existing content being scanned.
So I decided to demote older files to separate servers instead, not exactly 3 physical machines, but docker containers with different ports. Nonetheless, I can no longer have a single playlist to contain 3 separate libraries, the playlist from different servers cannot be merged into one. I know it is highly unlikely that Plex team would support cross library playlist, I’d still like to request it, thanks!
Why not just break the folders up, IE /Music/Section 1//Music/Section 2/ as directories in the same library (Im betting it has something to do with your folder structure). Worst case you can create new libraries on your same server. trying to use docker containers, and multi-servers will just give you a headache in the long run.
I did that as mentioned in my post, it takes not days not weeks but months and they are still scanning as I speak, while plex is scanning, Id did lose patience, i cant wait to try out new music, so i cut up into mutiple libraries as you said, libraries cant update simultaneously however, so at least i can see content grow in plex faster with multi server solution.
For partial scan to work, added path discrete enough to have siginificant improvement in scanning time, 3 4 or 4 wont cut it. Gotta be hundred at least. I kid you not i have not even completed initial scan after 5 months. Correct me if I’m wrong im under the pretense that say one new folder named Speak Now is added to one of the paths of a single library solution, say /music/section1, the entire section will be scanned, not /music/section/Speak Now folder only
Maybe I started out all wrong, I should push for simultaneous library scan and scan only new changes, existing music is ignored instead. May be add an option to scan for metadata and other changes in existing content of plex library at a higher interval say like 1 week, parameter not fixed of course, as a variable
Plex uses a smart scan process to check for folder modifications. You listed you are running on Windows, Linux and Mac?
Im going to bet there is something going on with your library configuration. My audio book library is not quite a large as yours (136,000 files across 5,400 albums) but it takes minutes, maybe 20-30 max, for a complete scan.
