OK, I was going to raise this as a question, but I may have solved it, all by my self, just now.
So this is probably both the question and the solution.
The album shows up once.
The tracks are only present once in the folder.
The tracks are shown twice in any plex application.
One of the “double tracks” is playable, the other is not.
And I suddenly realised I had updated the media tags on that artist.
Could it be the tracks show up twice because Plex is not able to understand that the tags are UPDATED, and insists that the new tags should represent a new file? Without being able to delete the old reference/track?
And would I be right in assuming that the ONLY way of fixing this is to rescan the metadata in my whole library?
(I have tried to “refresh metatata” on the offending album… It does not work, and even if it did work, I do not see any problems with the albums before I try to play them… and with a lot of albums and files, I would like an automated solution, if possible)
And I assume I have figured out WHY the problem arises, and I am guessing the solution I propose is the only one Plex is able to give me at the moment? Two days of rescanning media files and rebuilding library because I can’t do this folder by folder? (That would be a nice feature, by the way: Select what folders to rescan and update)
Inspect the Plex media info of both versions of a track.
Do they point to the same file on disk?
If not, you probably only need to empty the library trash.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200289326-emptying-library-trash/
@OttoKerner said:
Inspect the Plex media info of both versions of a track.
Do they point to the same file on disk?
If not, you probably only need to empty the library trash.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200289326-emptying-library-trash/
Sorry, bad description in the original post:
I emptied trash, updated database and more or less pressed all the buttons I could find, apart from the “refresh all metadata”, as I was hoping to avoid a three-day system update.
I did check the link to the files, and two and two was pointing to the same file, but only one “line in plex” was actually able to play the file…
Perform the Plex Dance with the affected album.
(with music, you can omit step 4 of the dance)
@OttoKerner said:
Perform the Plex Dance with the affected album.
(with music, you can omit step 4 of the dance)
Would I achieve the same by choosing “refresh all metadata”?
I do not know what albums are affected by this, and I may actually save some time by letting plex rescan everything rather than looking through my whole collection. Or would this just make Plex look at its own database, find the album, scan it, find it again, scan it… and still list it as two separate files in the same album folder?
@Jengeno said:
Would I achieve the same by choosing “refresh all metadata”?
No, certainly not.
I do not know what albums are affected by this, and I may actually save some time by letting plex rescan everything rather than looking through my whole collection. Or would this just make Plex look at its own database, find the album, scan it, find it again, scan it… and still list it as two separate files in the same album folder?
Rescanning cannot repair this condition.
May I see the Plex XML info of one affected track?
I think I know what happened.
You have renamed a folder after you added the track into Plex
File one SRVMusic/A/A-Ha/2015 - Cast In Steel [FLAC]/a-ha - Cast In Steel - 01 - Cast In Steel.flac
File two SRVMusic/A/A-ha/2015 - Cast In Steel [FLAC]/a-ha - Cast in Steel - 01 - Cast in Steel.flac
Notice the capitalization of the folder name A-Ha vs. A-ha
Those are technically different paths. Although Windows ignores the difference, other operating systems do treat those as different paths. And Plex is written to run on several OS’s.
This is a side-effect of this cross compatibility.
Rule#1: never rename files and folders after you added them into Plex. If you absolutely have to rename them, prepare to perform the Plex Dance afterwards.
@OttoKerner said:
I think I know what happened.
You have renamed a folder after you added the track into Plex
Of course!!!
(OK, most things makes sense when it is explained, but still)
I am new to the whole “Ubuntu” thing, but that was one of the first things I learnt. Capital letters vs non-capital letters. And the “they are no longer treated the same”.
So… plex dance coming up.
Is it as simple as “Plex treats them as two different files because of the “A-Ha” vs “A-ha”, but still find them in the same place, so, therefore, the “A-Ha” file is not deleted”? It actually makes sense.
Thank you so much for your help here. Everything is so much easier if there is some sort of “reason” behind it.
One quick question not quite related, but still, with the Plex Dance, it would help a bit:
Is there any way of asking Plex to scan only specific folders?
As you see from the file path, I have this
Letter
Artist
Album
thing going in my main music folder.
And right now it would really help if I could scan only the A-folder (or even better, only scan the A-ha folder)… I don’t think it is possible from what I see in Plex but I keep hoping there is more functionality I have missed:)
The alternative seems to be to create one library for each letter of the alphabet and then scan the correct library when I make changes, but… I am not sure it is worth the hassle of setting it up.
And will never rename anything again. EVER! 
(Edited out an idea I had of scanning my library for doubles… if I had any doubles in my library, that would be better than this:))
Thank you so much for all the help.
J
@Jengeno said:
One quick question not quite related, but still, with the Plex Dance, it would help a bit:
Is there any way of asking Plex to scan only specific folders?
Only per the command line interface
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201242707-plex-media-scanner-via-command-line/
The alternative seems to be to create one library for each letter of the alphabet and then scan the correct library when I make changes, but… I am not sure it is worth the hassle of setting it up.
That is a very bad idea, IMHO. It will make several features of Plex unusable.
For instance, this little thing will work so much better when all music is in one library. The automatic playlist generation only works within one library:
When in doubt, opt for lesser libraries, not more.
It will also fit better with the navigation concept of “type-first”, which will get implemented across all Plex clients.
Ok.
You solved all my problems!
(The ones related to Plex, at least)
And I have to dive into the whole “understanding Linux” thing to get the command line interface working. But that is OK. After I installed my Linux server, I may not understand everything but it has been a really stable installation. Not like my Windows computers who suddenly has to be restarted because “Windows thinks it is a good idea”
And Linux actually presents logs that I can READ.
Good to know that splitting my music library into several parts is not a good idea. I really hate doing a lot of work and THEN realising it was really stupid:)
Again, thank you for your patience in answering my questions here.
After reading your answers, I do feel kind of “not quite as smart as I would like to be as I didn’t figure this out on my own”, but hopefully that is just a result of your excellent answers and not an accurate measure of my incompetence in any way:)
J
@OttoKerner said:
When in doubt, opt for lesser libraries, not more.
It will also fit better with the navigation concept of “type-first”, which will get implemented across all Plex clients.
The final solution was to create a new library and delete the old one as soon as the new one was up and running.
It turns out I had 10.000 more songs in Plex than in my actual library, I would never have found them all by searching manually.
And all because I “fixed” artist, album and track-names!
Plex is downloading file-information now, and will probably keep doing that for the next 48 hours. But it will be worth it if I never mess up my library like this again!
Thanks for all the help along the way.
