Sonic Analysis caching behavior during analysis

Plex Labs
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A few months ago I noticed that I’d wake up to a message from Windows indicating that my C: drive had filled up overnight, but when I checked, everything seemed fine. After some digging I found the culprit: my PLEX server is set to run Sonic Analysis on my music libraries in the middle of the night, and it was getting stuck on one specific album. This album is not really an album; rather, it’s a massive collection of video game remixes that use the same album name (“OverClocked ReMix”); when I say massive, I’m talking 4000+ tracks.

I saw that when PLEX does its Sonic Analysis, it temporarily converts tracks to WAV format, which I guess makes sense because it has to actually process the audio. But this temporary WAV file doesn’t get deleted until the entire album is finished being analyzed, which would be fine for a standard album of 10 or even 20 tracks; but a 4000+ track “album” ends up filling up the hard drive, and PLEX stalls out because there’s no more space, so it (smartly) rolls back and deletes all the WAV files and gives up on Sonic Analysis for the night (please set me straight if I’m wrong about this process).

I would love to have Sonic Analysis run on my collection of OC ReMixes because I love using the Guest DJ function in Plexamp. I know the obvious work around here: re-tag the files so that they’re in smaller “albums.” But I’m really averse to making metadata slightly inaccurate just to get things to work.

So I guess my question is: is it necessary to keep the WAV files for an entire album on disk while Sonic Analysis is occurring, or can the behavior be adjusted so that analysis happens track by track? The process would be “convert to WAV, analyze WAV, delete WAV.”

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This definitely sounds like an edge case that Plex should address. No telling when they might get to it, though.

In the meantime you’d probably have better luck moving your Plex system to a drive with enough storage for the task, or symlinking in a different volume for the temp files, etc.

Or, maybe … If you removed that album and put it back ~500 songs at a time, maybe only the new songs would be scanned. That’s just a guess though. It would be easy to test though to get the test done quickly you might need to change your server settings to allow background tasks all the time.

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Unfortunately not. If you make any changes to the track number or the tracks themselves, the previous analysis is void and will be renewed.

I just asked and was told that it was such an edge case that not many people would benefit from the major amount of work (it would be a “complete rejiggering of the analyis pipeline”).
So, unfortunately not.

2 Likes
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I appreciate the quick follow-up, Otto. I’ll work out a work-around. :slight_smile:

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Unfortunate, but at least we have a fast answer.

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