Sonic Analysis Makes No Progress (Not Working)

@randall-dennison i agree. I don’t get nearly as mad or frustrated with Elan if I give him a year or two to work on projects like Plex Amp and the same goes for Sonic Analysis. Nearly everything that I kicked and griped about eh, years ago has nearly been taken care of. Elan and Team should be praised for their efforts but I still realize it’s always a work in progress. I feel like Covid and the whatever investment from the VC’s lit the fire under them, but because Sonic Analysis is in PlexLabs, it can be considered a Beta addition to the Plex Server. I’m just not too confident in it and I’ll have to respect Elan’s answer to my comment above. If you’re not ready, don’t activate it. Simple as that.

I’m aware and it’s also why I remember I had a bad time dealing with hang ups with Loudness Analysis when that was first introduced. Plex would have to be restarted several times even then. Loudness Analysis also took over a month to fully process two large music libraries with about 120,000 tracks each (approx. 240,000 tracks combined) and it’s definitely improved over the last year. It’s also why when Sonic Analysis was highlighted as a great addition to PlexAmp I wanted to turn it on, but I wasn’t certain what would break. I also have the need to combine both music libraries as one huge music library but I broke it up into two because the amount of problems with database and or Loudness Analysis lockups at the time were frustrating the hell out of me. I still haven’t created that one mega music library yet lol

If there’s one thing I think is a flaw of the Plex library management, which is also present in this thread is that when the transcoder gets stuck because of broken files the user doesn’t get proper feedback about it.

When I first started using Plex a couple of year ago I noticed that when syncing (and transcoding) some of my playlists it would just freeze on a “random” track and just get stuck there. I believe it is a similar issue as we see in this thread. Removing the faulty track and re-ripping it or just finding a new source and replacing the track also solved the problem, obviously. The difference being that when I synced a playlist I could somewhat easily identify which track was the cause, because the syncing progress was visible in the server and client GUI. As we see with the sonic analysis feature we don’t get an easy feedback on what album/track the transcoder is stuck at. An obvious (to me) solution would be to provide better feedback somewhere in the GUI on the actual progress, so that it would be easier to identify the fault. Reading the logs isn’t particularly end-user friendly. :slight_smile:

EDIT: It also seems to me that the Plex transcoder isn’t very good at dealing with “broken” files in general. The files Plex got stuck on in my library was direct playing just fine, and I never had problems with them in Winamp. I tried doing my own transcode using Winamp on some of the faulty files, and they transcoded just fine, and was read fine in Plex afterwards. Don’t really get why the Plex transcoder seems to be particularly bad at dealing with faulty files in the first place.

we’ve fixed the actual hang in the transcoder, which is probably best of all.

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well it is disabled in Plex and I do a weekly reboot on Sundays checked this morning Still trying to do the analysis. Any other ideas on how to get this to stop?

With it disabled in the Music library Sonic should not start but you can go to Server > Settings > Library and set Analyze audio tracks for sonic features to never.

I stopped trying to use it. It ran for a month or so and went from Analyzing 1118 albums to 1119. :slight_smile: Someday I may try to determine why.

Is this fix included in the latest available 1.24.4.5081-e362dc1ee? I’m confused since I use this version, and the issue with hung scanning seems to be there still.

I had the same error with the blobs db - What worked for me was (after backing up the “com.plexapp.plugins.library.blobs.db” of course) deleting the blobs DB entirely. (if it was screwed up, that probably explains why intro detection never worked for me). The server rebuilt it, and started scanning successfully. I’ll post back if there are any negative side effects.

Dear Elan, unfortunately there is also no progress with Sonic Analyzes on my Plex Server. Since last Friday there has been a report that there are still 7932 albums to go. Even after a restart of the server, the number remains at 7932. As for the progress, I only see the ‘moving circle’ on activity and when I click on it the number of albums still to be analysed. Attached is my log file. Plex Media Server Logs_2021-10-18_08-29-40.zip (8.9 MB)

Not a lot in here, butler had:

Butler: Performed sonic analysis on 0 batches of albums.

I would restart your server, and then scan + cancel scan (assuming you have it set up like this) and after waiting an hour or two, send fresh logs.

Dear Elan,

I already stopped the server yesterday. Since Plex didn’t come up properly, I even restarted my NAS. Sonic Analyzes started as a scheduled task last night with the result that the process, as before, hangs at 7932 albums.
Just stopped and started the server again to be able to stop Sonic Analyzes and in response to your request. By the way, I have no idea how else to stop Sonic Analyzes without restarting the server.

Attached are the fresh log files after the Plex Server started about 2 hours ago. Plex Media Server Logs_2021-10-19_14-42-02.zip (6.3 MB)

I see you set MusicAnalysisBehavior=scheduled; that won’t result in any logs until the nighttime (or whenever your scheduled tasks are run). Recommend you change that to be after content gets added, and then start/stop a scan.

The only other bit of data is that it seems to have tried to analyze Sade / Stronger Than Pride. If there is an issue with the files in that album, you can try to set it aside and see if the analysis makes progress.

Dear @elan,

I am having some similar issues with the sonic analysis. If I start a music library scan I see that sonic analysis is started; saying processing 770 albums. It runs for approximately 2 minutes and stops. I see in the logs (which I have also attached attached) the following…

DEBUG - [MusicAnalysis] MusicAnalysis: Analyzing album 18762 (10,000 Maniacs - Our Time in Eden).
DEBUG - [MusicAnalysis] Decoding 13 files for input to the analyzer.
ERROR - [MusicAnalysis] Track has no audio stream.
DEBUG - [MusicAnalysis] Killing job.

This occurs on the majority > 80% of the tracks it looks at. Then the scanning ends with…

DEBUG - [MusicAnalysis] Indexes completed.

Any ideas on this. I have had this feature on since I started with Plex about 2 months ago and there has been very little progress.

Thanks in advance.Plex Media Server Logs_2021-10-20_00-02-24.zip (6.1 MB)

Hi Elan,

I have removed Sade’s album “Stronger than Pride” from the library. I then changed the Sonic Analyzes task in settings to ‘as a scheduled task and as soon as media is added’.

Then I stopped and started the Plex server. Then scanned the files in the library. Immediately after that, Sonic Analyzes will start automatically.

Unfortunately, the analysis process hangs again; now (obviously) on 7931 albums. Nevertheless, I let the Sonic Analyzes process go for about 2 hours and then I turned off Sonic Analyzes in Settings and stopped the server.

However, Plex Server will not boot properly and a NAS restart is required to use Plex server again.

I put Sade’s album back in the library.

Attached you will find the log file as compiled after the above actions. Plex Media Server Logs_2021-10-20_15-55-18.zip (7.2 MB)

P.S. I started the songs from the Sade album with Plex beforehand and every song was clearly audible. So I don’t think there is anything wrong with those files.

Oct 20, 2021 14:01:51.755 [0x7f512df20b38] DEBUG - [MusicAnalysis] Decoding 85 files for input to the analyzer.

It’s working on a huge album. As long as you see your CPU :fire: it’s just working through analysis. Depending on the speed of your CPU, might take a while.

I’ll give it another try after the next Plex Server update. If - after a few days - there is still no progress, I will be happy to contact you again (if that is okay with you). Thanks for all the advice!

there might be nothing wrong with the current version for you. big albums take a long time to process.

You’re right. I’ll turn on Sonic Analyzes in a moment.

Hey Elan, any chance I can get you to take a look at my sonic scanning issue and logs I posted a few posts above this? My post

I was afraid you might have missed it as you were helping John_Rosema. Thanks.