How to start the scraper?

[jmalmsten]

Ok. I have some free time on my hands, so I thought I would try to get my music collection recognized in Jellyfin. And... sigh...

I have the music in a folder on the same DS920+ that Jellyfin is running on in a docker. I try to keep the image updated to the latest in a vain attempt to finally get a build that fixes this problem I'm having. But no. Still nothing.

So, the problem? I add the music files. One folder per album. I have the titles from the vendor I bought the files from. I select that music folder for the music library. I hit refresh metadata. It finds nothing. I go to the main dashboard. I hit rescan all libraries. It finds nothing.

So I search around the interwebs and apparently. I should be using a metadata tagger to destructively alter the files... ok. To try things out. I make a copy of my music folder for backup. I download Musicbrainz that everyone is recommending. I direct it to the folder with the music and not the backup. I then go ahead and do a search for all the files. It identifies nearly all of them. I press save, it generates .nfo files for all the albums in all the album folders. I go back to jellyfin. I remove the folder from the library and re-add it. I do a rescan of all libraries.

OK now I have a grid of albums where it shows all my albums... greeeeat... But... the actual metadata in those .nfo files? Naaaah... not used at all. Jellyfin just shows all of the files folder by folder in an unidentified way.

Now. I am familiar with Jellyfin behaving like this because that's how it has been behaving for me for close to a year now for movies and TV shows. I add the files and folders all according to the canonized methodologies. I hit refresh and rescan. I look in the folder. I see nothing in the latest entries. But if I do a search for the title it shows up as unidentified. So I then have to manually go to identify, add in the title and year. It dutifully finds the movie or TV-show I am looking for. And when I select it, it does load all the metadata from whatever metadata provider it's asking from.

So Now... Now I am faced with the same thing with the music library. I have to jump through hoop after hoop to even get Jellyfin to even see that there are album folders in the music folder to begin with. And I now still have to manually go through each album and MANUALLY do an identify because Jellyfin can't be bothered to actually read the .nfo files I generated?

Or am I doing something wrong here? Why is this such a convoluted workflow? If I have the .nfo files there generated with musicbrainz. Why can't Jellyfin just read them?

Oh, and also. When I try to play the music tracks. it (the linux jellyfin client player) just gets stuck in a loop. If I try playing the album from the beginning with the play button for the album instead of the individual files, it plays the first track fine. But if I try to skip forward. Nothing happens. So, clearly something is broken during playback as well. Is this connected with the scraper problem? I don't know.

I just want to know what I am doing wrong here.

[jmalmsten]

Bumping it once to see if anyone has a clue as to what is going on.

[jmalmsten]

Bumping it once more. As the Music library is completely empty again.

Does noone have any clue what I am doing wrong here?

[jmalmsten]

OK. The scraper issue is spreading.

I am now not able to scan the library I have named Found Shorts. Again. It worked before. But now. Nothing I add to that folder is found by Jellyfin.

As I have no real clues as to what is going wrong... I resorted to removing the library completely in jellyfin. And re-added it. I match the settings I have for the folders with full movies. And. Now when I try to populate the Found Shorts Library... I get nothing. Not even the stuff that used to be found can be seen. The folder is not empty on the disk system. It's full of hundreds of shorts. Hundreds of shorts that could be found by Jellyfin before. But not now.

Deep breath now....

I tried looking in the jellyfin log for today. I found nothing that clues me really. I have several errors stating

"System.IO.IOException: The configured user limit (128 ) on the number of inotify instances has been reached, or the per-process limit on the number of open file descriptors has been reached."

And as I scroll down the logs. I see further errors of the same type, only the "Configured user limit" is now "(8192)". I have no clue what that is. All I can surmise is that something is setting it to something evenly divisable with 8.


But those are logged both on the working and non working libraries...so is it even relevant???

So as things goes. I now have lost both the Found Shorts library and the Music Library. And rebuilding them seems impossible. Does noone still have any clue or tip pointing towards what is going on here? Will things just continue to spread to more and more libraries? I don't know.

[bitmap]

The three main culprits of not finding anything are 1) permissions, 2) naming conventions, and 3) wrong library type.

For 1) just make sure the user running Jellyfin has permissions to access the files.

For 2) check the naming conventions for the various library types. For something you don't expect to find metadata for, movies or home videos/photos are the best choices. Turn off any metadata suppliers that you won't need if using movies.

For 3) be careful about sub-subfolders. The two acceptable routes are:

Library Folder > Movie/Series Folder [> Season Folder] > Media
Root Folder > Library Folder [A, B, C...] > etc...

You always add at the library folder level. If you have multiple subfolders for movies, you won't find much. If you have non-matching folders for series (e.g., just a year, names of animators), Jellyfin will struggle to pick things up. You can organize by things like year or season name if you'd like, just make sure the folder includes "Season".

[jmalmsten]

Ok. But for all three points. I will have to reiterate. I follow the prescribed conventions. I point libraries to their own folders. Those folders do not overlap. I put the title folder in the library folder. I follow the canonized naming conventions and folder structures...

To reiterate once again. It, Jellyfin, could see them before. It could see them and play them.

I use the same structure both for movies and shorts libraries. Jellyfin sees the entries in movies folder, but not shorts. It could before.

And "sees" them. Is a generous description. As I mentioned times before. That while it finds files in the "working" libraries. It keeps them hidden and unidentified until I manually search for them by name, do a manual identify search and then, finally, they are available in libraries. That's a problem I have been tearing my hair out about for years now, but just gritted my teeth because the workaround, while tedious, usually worked.

But then, I now noticed that the workaround doesn't work anymore for the library named "Found Shorts". And after removing the library and readding it with the same settings as the "working" libraries... It can't even find the hundreds of shorts that are in the library folder that it could find before.

And the music library never really functioned for me. It keeps sometimes showing me unidentified albums, sometimes that library is empty completely. And when it does show, playback is nonexistant sometimes... And I try to identify albums, but soon enough, that's a wasted effort because it reverts to being empty again and when it shows albums again it reverts to unidentified albums.

It all feels like throwing darts at quantum dartboards. It's all so fickle and ephemeral. I never can assume what is needed or what star sign it expects...