Emby Server and Music metadata, replacing feat. with ,

[DonMacaroni 27]

Emby is near perfect Music library manager, compared to Synologu Audio Station, but is there an way to disable this automation?

I would prefer seeing Artists exactly as they are in actual Id3v2 tags.

Edited March 28, 2022 by DonMacaroni

[Happy2Play 8371]

EDIT: Sorry you want to actually still see it that way, so program around to leave feat but still have the artists separate.  As right now leaving feat in will make it one person not two.

Since you are not showing complete metadata you have to have additional "Artists" tags otherwise you would see the name feat name as one item..

Will look for an example.

But you want Emby to program around feat and still show two separate artists instead of one.

 

 

Edited March 28, 2022 by Happy2Play

[DonMacaroni 27]

Nope, I don’t have separate ARTISTS tag field and creating one would be quite challenging, considering my library size.

Still, I am a bit puzzled from where Emby gets that data, I disabled all additional metadata sources on purpose. 
But still somehow, it seems to grab it from ARTIST tag field and replaces “feat.” with “,” 

And no, I don’t want to separate them as it only makes sense, if this separation would handle “&” (and some other odd things like “und”, “meets”, “with”, etc.) the same way, which it does not. So I would prefer if it would be handled as one Artist, instead of all the mess it currently causes.
Maybe it is configurable somewhere, but I have not found that setting.

Edited March 28, 2022 by DonMacaroni

[Happy2Play 8371]

Luke must be programing around it now so we don't have to manually change it.

Or you end up with one person with that display name.  Another example where track had with so you get one person instead of two

[DonMacaroni 27]

14 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

Luke must be programing around it now so we don't have to manually change it.

Or you end up with one person with that display name.  Another example where track had with so you get one person instead of two

 

Yep, and that is fine by me, but currently it treats “feat.” differently and splits it to mulitple Artists.

I can give you an better example:

In Id3tag ARTIST field: “Artist1 & Artist2 feat. Artist3”

Results in Emby ARTISTS metadata field as: “Artist1 & Artist2, Artist3” which does not make sense.

Problem with such programmatic splitting is, it is not very flexible. How would your code know that “&” is artist spearator or for example “with” and not part of the actual name? So IMHO it should not be done at all or at least should be configurable, so in case it creates some weird results it could be disabled. 

Edited March 28, 2022 by DonMacaroni

[Happy2Play 8371]

1 minute ago, DonMacaroni said:

Yep, and that is fine by me, but currently it treats “feat.” differently.

Original method got to many complaints as it is two people not one, and spammed Artists with all of these rogue entries as that single name does not exist.

Only way I would accept this is if it were the same as say Musicbrainz and built two people maintaining the "word separator" as a single item that is a no go.

 

[DonMacaroni 27]

4 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

Original method got to many complaints as it is two people not one, and spammed Artists with all of these rogue entries as that single name does not exist.

Well, if you look at the example I gave, in my previous post you’ll see that it does not actually solve that problem or solves it only partially. 

[Happy2Play 8371]

All Emby is doing is properly delimiting two artists.  As feat should never make two people one in my opinion but everyone has their own preference.  If it were added back it would have to be options.

[DonMacaroni 27]

10 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

All Emby is doing is properly delimiting two artists.  As feat should never make two people one in my opinion but everyone has their own preference.  If it were added back it would have to be options.

I would actually prefer configurable regex (with that “feat.” rule predefined, for example), that way everybody could have their own rules and rules could be easily enhanced/added/removed.
I am not against the splitting, it makes perfect sense, but only if you can cover 99% of occasions. If you cannot it is better to leave it alone or you would cause additional headache.
For example Artist1 feat. Artist2 is currently splitted into two, but not if they are tagged as Artist1 & Artist2, while they are 99% time, exact same thing.

Edited March 28, 2022 by DonMacaroni

[Happy2Play 8371]

31 minutes ago, DonMacaroni said:

For example Artist1 feat. Artist2 is currently splitted into two, but not if they are tagged as Artist1 & Artist2, while they are 99% time, exact same thing.

That is the issue with and/& as it can be delimiter or actual name so you can not automatically delimited. 

Sonny & Cher is one Artist.  There is so much grey area with music it is impossible to cover everything and please everyone.  That is why specific delimiters apply right now ( semicolon, forward slash and looks like feat.)  And even a hard coded whitelist for Artist with slash in their names (AC/DC).

Edited March 28, 2022 by Happy2Play

[DonMacaroni 27]

Forward slash is standard separator for id3v2.3 AFAIK.

For id3v2.4 it is NULL character (Emby does not seem to handle that at all, for some reason and does not display anything when you use NULL as field/frame separator.)

ARTISTS tag field, is not part of the any id3 standard at all, but you can have it as user defined field as TXXX frame in id3v2.4

Anyway, thx...now I at least know how to control what appears as Artists metadata in Emby.

It would still nice to be able to disable this splitting in Emby though, not everybody needs it or would be happy with it.

I personally probably have to ditch the idea of using Emby for my music collection as for me, it screws up the way I handle Artists in my collection and adding that additional field ARTISTS would be multi-year job.

Edited March 29, 2022 by DonMacaroni