"Some" flac albums metadata is not read

Plex Media Server Metadata & Adding Files
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Server Version#: 1.15.4.993
Player Version#: all

Hi!

I’ve had a problem with my music library for quite a while (so I don’t think it is version specific).

My music library is made of 1500 albums. ALL those albums I ripped to FLAC myself using, XLD. So they all have proper tags and all follow the same naming scheme.

Out of these 1500 albums, it looks like about 30 are missing poster and release date. Even though the files do actually contain this info, just like all the others that are working. I am struggling to find out what’s wrong about these specific albums. So far, I have tried the following:

  • Deleting library, re-creating the library. Using a basic library, embedded music tags and Personal Media Assets as the agent. After re-creation, same albums are still not imported correctly
  • Looking at logs from server and scanner. Couldn’t see anything relevant, even in verbose mode.

What can I try next to figure out what’s wrong with these ? Also, is there a way for me to find the albums more easily ? (Like a query that would say “show me all albums without date”)

Thanks!

2

I digged into this a bit further. Turns out the problem occurs when the album path contains a special character like É or À. In that event, Plex can still read the file and some of its metadata (the album name is definitely read from the metadata and not inferred from file structure) but year and cover are broken.

My server is running inside Docker ans files are stored on the Linux host, on an ext4 fs. Any idea ?

Thanks!

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Looks really similar to Setting locale to UTF8, will investigate on that front

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After more digging and investigation, this is a duplicate of Local Media Assets: Metadata fails to load when there are unicode characters in the file path

But not sure how to solve the problem with Docker. Running locale inside the container returns:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
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I can’t reproduce the issue with the same PMS version on either macOS or Docker on macOS. Seems to be specific to my linux host.

6

Ok, making some progress. I identified the albums that have a problem all contain characters fully expanded out (normalized as NFD). Normalizing them to NFC solves the problems. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7931204/what-is-normalized-utf-8-all-about

Exemple: é and é might look identical in the browser, but they are actually different (e\xcc\x81 and \xc3\xa9) and Plex on Linux only works with the latter. Why?

The thing is macOS writes NFD by default and these files come from macOS initially before they went to Google Drive and are then fetched back by rclone. So I can’t really convert them all, this will keep happening.

1 Like
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