r/navidrome • u/the-pnw-tree-octopus • 5h ago
When editing tags, what causes Navidrome to scan existing files in as entirely new copies instead of updating what already exists?
Like many I've amassed a collection of music over the years that has dubious tagging, to say the least.
Recently, I've finally sunk my teeth into beets and am properly re-tagging my collection in chunks.
I've noticed that most of the time Navidrome is pretty good at re-scanning existing media and simply updating metadata while keeping the existing copies and playback statistics. However, sometimes the updated tags will result in albums being scanned in as if they were entirely new to the library, and the old version of a given album will need to be manually removed from the missing files page.
I've not yet been able to identity which tag(s) in particular cause this behaviour. So far it's not been a big issue for me to just delete the old copy and move on, but eventually I will get to re-tagging music that I would definitely like to not risk losing playback statistics because of this occasional behaviour.
Are there specific tags or changes in tags that are known to cause this? If/when it happens again, is it possible to migrate playback data from the old copy to the new before deleting from the missing files page?