Frank
7ee831adee
Three things the 2026-10-31 five-library relayout taught, written where the next operator reads them: - A verify run must open the servers' databases plain `mode=ro`. Both keep their libraries in WAL mode; `immutable=1` skips the write-ahead log, so a scanner's own committed rows read as missing and the read can fail as "database disk image is malformed". The census page claimed immutable — now it says what the code does. - "No row at the destination" splits into four classes, and only REAL (no row at dst AND the file still at src) is the relayout's own damage. Phantom rows naming a pre-move path are normal behaviour for both servers. And the owning server decides whether a pass can convict: Jellyfin holds no audiobook library, so that journal verifies against Plex or it proves nothing. - A chain of passes rolls back newest journal first, or the tool refuses; the refusals measured that day are the tool working, not failing. The music and audiobook arms moved to their own pages (progressive disclosure; the parent drops 175 lines and stays the owner of the shared gates, the executor, the journal law and the rollback). Stale per-run counts destroyed: episode counts, byte sizes, move tallies for a pass that already happened.
3.8 KiB
type, title, description, tags, timestamp
| type | title | description | tags | timestamp | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| reference | Media Audiobook Relayout | Re-filing /mnt/entropy/Audiobooks by Plex's chapter rows: narrator shelves, no renumbering, the refusals. |
|
2026-10-31T00:00:00Z |
Media Audiobook Relayout
/mnt/entropy/Audiobooks is the one library here that Jellyfin does not read
at all — its music scanner has no audiobook concept — while Plex indexes all
of it as Artist → Album → Track: the album is the BOOK, that book's single artist
is the NARRATOR, both matched out of the files' own tags. Today one book is split
across … [Part 1], … [Part 2] folders three or four deep inside a collection
pack, so a scan serves three quarters of a novel; scripts/media-audiobooks.py
re-files the tree so the property both servers' book scanners assume is true —
Audiobooks/<Narrator>/<Book> (<year>)/<the file keeps its own name>
The shared gates, the executor, the journal law and the rollback live in Media Relayout; this page is the audiobook arm only.
# 1. The authority: Plex's chapter rows for this root (the DB opens read-only).
python3 scripts/media-census.py audiobooks --root /mnt/entropy/Audiobooks \
--out /tmp/ab_rows.tsv
# 2. What is on disk (stat only).
python3 scripts/media-census.py enumerate --root /mnt/entropy/Audiobooks \
--out /tmp/ab_enum.tsv
# 3. The plan.
python3 scripts/media-audiobooks.py --root /mnt/entropy/Audiobooks \
--enum /tmp/ab_enum.tsv --rows /tmp/ab_rows.tsv --out /tmp/ab_plan.tsv \
--exceptions /tmp/ab_exceptions.txt
# 4. Read the exceptions file FIRST. Then the same executor, journal and rollback
# as [[Media Relayout]] shows, on its own journal, and refresh the Plex section
# as in step 5 of the movie Procedure — from inside the container, never over
# the host port.
scripts/media-apply.py apply --plan /tmp/ab_plan.tsv --root /mnt/entropy \
--journal /mnt/entropy/media-relayout-audiobooks.jsonl --apply
The group is the identity Plex asserts in its own database — (narrator, book, year) — so one book arriving in four part folders becomes one folder, and a 1965 and a 2020 recording that share a title stay two books.
Two laws are forced by what the rows actually hold:
+- A chapter is never renumbered. Most books contain chapters whose index Plex
does not know, so a number written into a name would be invented — and it would
buy nothing, because both servers order playback by the embedded track tag, not
by the file name. A wrong number in a name is the number a human later trusts.
Fix order in the tags: a Plex scan re-reads tags and never renames a file.
+- The shelf is the narrator, not the author. Every book has exactly one artist
row and it is the narrator; the author survives only inside some album titles
(Kryptos by Graham McNeill) and in no column Plex stores, so deriving it would
mean parsing titles where a ripper wrote one and inventing it everywhere else.
The author stays visible in the folder name Plex itself shows.
What it refuses, the music arm's list with one addition: a video container, audio
no chapter row names, and a loose file in a folder holding two books all park under
_unsorted with the path they have today — and so does a chapter whose row names
no book or no narrator: a placeholder ([Unknown Album], [Unknown Artist])
that unrelated books share, or a chapter number mistagged as the artist (0.4).
Various Artists is not a placeholder — that is a multi-cast read.
The reviewed plan lives at /mnt/entropy/media-relayout-audiobooks-plan.tsv; it
applies on its own journal, behind the music writer, and then refreshes the Plex
section. Verify it with --db-kind plex — Jellyfin holds no rows here, so a
Jellyfin pass proves nothing either way.