@d2freak do you find that overtime sonic analysis gets redone for albums which have not changed ?
As an example, I added a bunch of albums today (27), one of which is a Ennio Morricone album. When I add an album I always refresh the metadata for the artist afterwards so that any tracks from the added album get populated into the popular tracks section.
Anyhow, I have a large number of Ennio Morricone albums (93) and these have all been queued and are being processed for sonic analysis again. I had previously seen this earlier in the week when I added an album to Various Artists, of which I have over 400 albums but thought that was an anomaly however now I’m thinking this is not the case.
That’s interesting. No I haven’t personally seen this. For example I have a pretty substantial various artists section as well, and when I add a few new albums, the other ones already scanned does not seem to be rescanned.
However, I do not refresh metadata for the Artist when I add albums. Perhaps it has to do with that
Maybe, I’ll do some more tests and see if I can track down what’s happening. However, its pretty bad that after I add approx 25+ albums that over 250+ need sonic completed against it.
Yes that seems extremely wasteful. Some other differences just in case it proves helpful for your testing:
From what I’ve seen on the forum, you’re using the new local metadata agent right? I’m using the standard Plex Music. Maybe some bug with the new agent?
I’m also not using “use local metadata”. Could be something there too I suppose.
I’m also not generally using the trick with “when media is added". I only use it when I add a ton of music which is pretty seldom then I set it back to “during scheduled hours". So my observations are only with the Butler. Perhaps “when media is added" is causing the rescan, but honestly I think I would have noticed and I haven’t seen that either
I’ve been adding single albums across different artists and also the Various Artists grouping and what I’m seeing is that sometimes it will sonic the one added album and other times it will sonic a bunch. I guess depending on whatever is being added the system is needing to rebuild some internal stuff causing sonic to kick in again.
For now, I’ll just stop monitoring and just let it process organically
I’ve seen the same happen in my library. When I add some albums and do a “scan library files” it will populate and process the new stuff, and every now and then also reprocess some unrelated things that’s been in my library forever. No idea why it happens, but it absolutely does happen.
Try playing with the DJ options as something sonic analysis supports. I didn’t really appreciate it until I started actually playing with that feature.
I often just shuffle my content rather than curating specific playback (either full library or a couple smart playlists) like you mentioned and using DJ Stretch, DJ Twofer and DJ Gemini can give that random mix playback a different feel.
Edit:
I second this. I moved my soundtrack, classical and Christmas music to separate libraries specifically for this reason as well (other than a couple I don’t mind being surprised by). This works pretty well with the setting to ONLY look at the library that’s loaded and not all music libraries available. And for those dedicated music libraries it works well being able to shuffle\random play within just that library for holiday time or orchestral only sessions without needing to manage specific albums or playlists.
Thanks, I should have been more specific with my above post above. I have been using the Guest DJs with the Library Radio. DJ Stretch & Twofer are the ones I’m finding I’m using the most so far.
While I get what you mean this seems alien to me. I want everything in the one library.
Totally understand. I used to focus all in one as well with my local music setup (when using WinAmp and iTunes) and just made sure my genre tags were specific so I could exclude those holiday and classical or OST pieces from my “random library play” by using smart playlists that excluded those genres. That didn’t work in PlexAmp the same way since it’s using other metadata sources and the sonic analysis (and I’ve gotten lazy about managing it manually). For me, anyways, I don’t actually have that much “other” content so it’s literally just a Christmas library - which gets ignored 11 months outta the year - and an Orchestral library. Similar to how some services have broken out Classical music.
You can likely manage it via playlists though, particularly smart playlists, if you keep up on the metadata, which I know you do :); it just might not mix with some of the DJ and Radio features. Or if you don’t mind an occasional surprise! song in which case that works too, no right or wrong here.
After 2 weeks, unfortunately I think I’m done with this feature.
While I see some benefits its incredibly wasteful. On friday, I added 2 albums to Various Artists and once scanned it forced all 400+ to queued for Sonic Analysis. Today, I added another 3 and yet again its all have been queued. Everything else is unchanged, I’m just adding albums !
No idea if this is because I use embedded metadata, if its unique to Various Artists or if the code is just fragile to changes but having to deal with this is just not worth it …
Anyhow, I’m not bitter at all. I now know what I get and what its limitations are if I ever decide to investigate this again but for now its getting disabled.
Thanks everyone for their responses to this thread, its been very helpful.
As an FYI… I’ve had some time in the last few days to run some additional tests and I think what I’ve been experiencing could be a bug. For context, here is my typical workflow when I add an album …
add/update the tags using musicbrainz picard
rename the files to match the plex media naming for music
copy the files over to my production server
scan the files and let plex process them and match them
force refresh the artist metadata which had any albums which where added
then run analyse on the artist
I’m now confident that point 6 is what is causing the sonic to get redone, even on albums which where done already. If I scan library at this point, lets call that step 7) in the workflow, what I’m seeing is that after I analyse any artist, even for ones which have not had anything added to changed sonic analysis gets triggered again. This should not happen or at least I don’t think it should.
So, for now, I’m going to leave this enabled on my server and change point 6 to be
then run analyse on any albums added or just omit this step altogether
@drzoidberg33 I normally wouldn’t tag you folks however this might be of interest to you. I sense this could be a bug as doing an analyse on something which had analyse already done should not force sonic to be redone. Loudness and deep analyse does not see this happen, it appears to be only sonic.
Step 5 is very important for me at least as popular tracks and genre’s will not populate correctly until the artist is refreshed.
Years ago I remember asking about this and plex didn’t want an entire artist refreshing when adding a single album as there could be 10s (even 100s) of albums against an artist which would not be ideal for slower systems so I have always done it manually. Step 6, I’ve always just done as its the quickest way to analyse new content but I think I’ll just adjust this now.
Thanks for confirming that. I ran a test to adjust the scheduled maintenance from 7pm → 9pm and I can see 0 analysed with 272 having deep analysis completed which tallies with what I added.
What I do find interesting is that loudness was done a second time even with it being set to be done when media is added and I had confirmed it was completed as the waveform was available.
I’ve not had the problem of mass rescans, but my workflow is “put properly tagged albums into the library and start a library scan.” It only ever scans the new stuff.
Once in a while I do notice it scanning a couple of albums when it should be idle. Unfortunately we have no way to tell what it is actually doing, the GUI does not list album names, and if you examine the process it uses cryptic UIDs. I suspect that there may be a problem with a couple of files which choke the scanner, or some other bug. I wish I knew what it was working on.
I am sure there are still bugs in Sonic Analysis – I just have never seen hundreds of rescans queued.
It definitely chokes on DRM files, if you have any in your library. I have a few singlets which have DRM from iTunes which I can’t be bothered to remove; So every time I scan in a new album (and for about 1.5 minutes during scheduled maintenance) these same files are analyzed, unsuccessfully.
I’m good. Its because I was running a manual analyse at the full artist level when I added new content to an artist which then schedules sonic to be done for all albums for that artist. This is why it done over 400 for my Various Artrists albums.
