As a data point, I have a twin Xeon E5-2670 (2x8 cores, 2x16 threads) server with 48GB of RAM. I’m averaging about 20 seconds per album. I have well over 10,000 albums. This is going to take days at best…
fwiw, the analysis appears to do multiple albums simultaneously, but each is single threaded, so consider whatever your cpu passmarks is for single core speed, which determines how fast an individual album is processed, versus number of cores determines how many albums at a time.
in any case, all should simply know/understand up front, that large libraries will take a long time to analyze, and there are no results until it is complete.
if you want to experiment/see it done faster, start with a smaller/test library.
eventually your patience should be rewarded with some pretty magical mixes.
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So to update after leaving it overnight…
It has processed 57 albums in 821 minutes.
That’s 14.4 Minutes per album.
At that rate - it will take 181 DAYS (6 months) to complete processing my music library.
THIS CANNOT BE CORRECT. There is something wrong with my database or something.
HOW DO I FIX THIS?
I’m no computer expert and the computer is a few years old - I’ve got a AMD FX 6530 six-core processor at 3.90 GHZ.
Is there something I’m doing wrong?
HELP ME PLEASE - I can’t leave this process running for SIX MONTHS.
It is very likely correct. We are talking about “machine learning” here. This is relatively new technology and is computing intensive.
Sorry to be frank, but your CPU model is quite a few years old by now.
It might simply not be up to snuff anymore. PassMark - AMD FX-6350 Six-Core - Price performance comparison
Yep, takes forever… So
…we need a pristine computer to run plex now :-)… Joy! Wonder what the experience is running on Nvidia Shield? That was my next server.
Some features need more power than others… think of transcoding of 4K HDR w/ tone mapping vs. some direct play.
The good thing about this sonic features is that the massive load is only needed for the initial analysis and not whenever you play something or use some of those features.
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I have just over 900 albums, and so far it’s taken about an hour and a half to process 100. So, 13-14 hours to do my whole collection.
Headless Dell tower with 8 GB RAM and an Intel i5 running Ubuntu 20.04.
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For comparison, I started about 6 hours ago and I’ve completed nearly 25% of my 870 albums. So looking at 24 hours to complete. Running Centos on a HP Proliant DL380, 16GB RAM and 2 x Intel Xeon processors making 16 core 2.40 GHz.
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Just a reminder when MP3s first came out, most desktop computers did not have enough CPU power to play an MP3 and do literally anything else.
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Unsupported.
I have 4290 albums… 
Well it is an optional feature.
How do you know how many albums have been processed and how long it took?
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I have almost half my FLAC library complete under the sonic analysis (26hrs running) (Haven’t started my mp3 library yet) .
Do we have to wait for it to complete or can we start using this feature mid-sonic-analysis?
Yes, I am hoping that it will start using albums that are already processed and not wait for everything to do be done. I have over 11,000 albums 
BTW, how will we know if an album is analyzed? Will there be additional tags when we view the information using “Get info”?
Unfortunately you will need to wait for it to complete the final index building occurs once the album scanning has completed (but this takes a relatively short amount of time compared to the album scans)
Just a quick note that once complete and you add new albums, it will quickly roll them into the existing indices, so radios/everything built off Sonic will ‘just work’ moving forward and new media will find its way in where it belongs
The activity monitor in Plex Web will show the number of albums remaining (so take however many albums you have - how many are left to see how many are done) and can extrapolate from there the time remaining. Unfortunately there is not an ETA/clock built in to the scanning
You will need to wait until it is complete to get a sense of this however, typically you will see “Sonically Similar Albums” in a hub at the bottom of the album page, this is the indication an album has been scanned/matched.
@shrtstck Thank you. I was looking for any indication for it and wasn’t finding it.
I understand why the process takes so long as I tinker with machine learning and open source AI.
Looking forward to taking it for a spin. Happy Friday!
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Happy to help, the wait is long but well worth it once you’re on the other side. Have a wonderful weekend!
