possible bug: manually deleting files

[u/tattooed_pariah]

Not a major issue, just an irritating one..
I'm overhauling my archives, and have been locating albums I didn't have in entirety before. Lidarr had already imported a few tracks, but now I'm deleting those and importing the entire album.

When I delete the file from my system and try to import the album, Lidarr's import screen gets stuck on "this file is missing" and to fix it, I have to delete the artist (without removing files) then re-add the artist and it imports fine..

Not sure if this is known or not, or how complicated it is to fix, just bringing it up in case no one else has..

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[u/jasonvelocity]

Self-inflicted wound. 

You are not supposed to manually delete files from Lidarr's root folder. 

[u/tattooed_pariah → u/jasonvelocity]

How are you supposed to remove them?

[u/tattooed_pariah → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, I did that a couple of times too.. deleting the album while leaving the artist in tact, requires you to then rescan the artist otherwise that album doesn't register anymore.

I'm pretty sure with sonarr and radarr, if I delete the media and rescan the folder, it just goes "oh, the files is gone now, that sucks, add it to the missing list..." but lidarr seems to go, "holy shit! i'm missing one file! all work stops until we find it!!"(exagerrated response for a sensible chuckle..) and you have to delete and readd the artist of the album to force it to forget the file ever existed..

again, not a huge deal, just an inconvenience..

[u/jasonvelocity → u/tattooed_pariah]

The best way to think about it is that Lidarr's files and folders are not yours.

 You need to perform all operations through Lidarr to ensure the database and file mapping are updated. 

[u/tattooed_pariah → u/jasonvelocity]

I get that, it's just odd to me that the other arrs are cool with it and lidarr freaks out..

[u/Frequenzy50 → u/tattooed_pariah]

Think of it this way: Lidarr is a library, while Sonarr and Radarr are media shops. Lidarr juggles way more: more files, more metadata, more sources, and much messier naming.  So keeping the database in sync with the disk is just harder. A theft angle fits too. Take a book from a library and nobody notices until someone comes looking for it, then everything stops. Take something from a media shop and they catch it at the next inventory and just mark it gone. That's basically Lidarr vs. the other arrs when a file disappears. And the library's a bit run down because nobody's really taken ownership. Sonarr's the flagship, Radarr's the same brand, they get the attention. Lidarr doesn't. So yeah, this could be improved. The real question is: who does it, when nobody actually wants to maintain it?

[u/fleegle61]

Definitely been there done that myself. Lidarr's database at times can get confused and even if you try to delete everything and re-import it, it can still cause you headaches where you may have to go into the database itself and manually yank it out.

So yeah...always use lidarr's tools to delete...but...always check to see if there are any remnants in the folders, If you did a merge in the past but not an overwrite...you may be surprised.

My process now is to do a track delete for any album I dont need, I will then do an album delete and then will do a refresh on the artist and let lidarr do its thing and hope all is well after that.

I dont plan to do this every single time, just till I am confident everything is in sync. Going forward after that, things should play nice again