Custom genres in music does nothing...

[Gunther123 1]

Emby server 4.7.14

I have thousands of music and sound files from decades of enjoying music.

In MP3Tag, I have perfected the metadata, names, bands, album artists, artists, genre...

When I add my music folder to Emby, with 775 permissions for the Emby user, Emby adds piles of completely random bull* genres... Things like "Alternative New Wave West Coast Funk Pop Rock", what is that even? I just wanted "Rock", "Pop", the things I have added and customised to be present.

I have tried to remove the "Album Metadata" selections in the music library, still, the completely random and unrelated genres persist after a library rescan/metadata refresh.

I have tried to make custom genres in Emby, but despite rescanning the Metadata and Library, I get "Playback Error - No playable items found" when I try to play a newly created genre which shows up in the library.

I have deleted everything and started over at least 3 times today, each time I have tried a new setting or strategy...

Far and away, this is the feature that is most required and will result in my cancelling subscription for sure as it really make no sense and is ruining hundreds of hours of meticulous sorting.

What I want is to have Emby show the music I have in only the genres that are encoded into the MP3 files, themselves.

That is all I want, but it seems there is some hidden or obscure setting or process that keeps adding these random garbage genres to my music and sound collection.

How can I disable this "feature" and only show the genres in the MP3 file?

 

 

Many thanks

[Gunther123 1]

If I completely delete Emby and reinstall, add a music folder and disable every single checkbox, these bull* genres persist, so it seems to be this is something that is baked into Emby?

[Luke 37192]

Hi there, can you please show a specific example? thanks.

[Gunther123 1]

Sure.

As the user who has all permissions to all libraries.

I have an album that has been digitized as flac, genre is "Rock", imported and after an hour or so, the various processes have updated the artwork and these new genres have appeared:

 

I know genre is a little subjective, but clearly this is too much, so I remove them all and create a new genre "Eighties", for demonstration purposes:

After a few minutes, the genre shows up in Genres:

Now of course, I want to play that genre (after adding many more albums):

I can, however, enter the Genre folder and play any specific album if I click it. The application of the genre behaves differently to the ones Emby creates.

I have tried to refresh Metadata, refresh Library, I have manually kicked off all the scheduled tasks I can find to see if there is some update issue. All the folders of the install and libraries are all 775, so I have full permissions for the services at the server and the I am using the admin user at the client for this, so there should be no limits.

In short: I cannot create a new genre that can be played. If I disable Musicbrainz and AudioDB at the library level, I keep getting these weird genres.

In my library, I have about 850 albums and 176 genres with Emby. When I use Kodi, I have only the 8 genres I have created and sorted everything as.

- Where are the extra genres coming from?

- Why can I not play a custom genre?

Nice to have features would be if I could select multiple albums and edit metadata or edit the genres of artists and have that flow on to their albums.

Your help, tips or hints would be greatly appreciated. I cropped the images to remove and specific details about albums and servers. Sorry for the rant-y tone, its been a frustrating experience.

 

 

[Gunther123 1]

Overnight, all the sh*tty genres returned, magically...

[Luke 37192]

Can you show the full screenshot of the metadata editor, including the top? Thanks.

[Gunther123 1]

This screen?

Notice, the padlock is still set on the genre field:

[Luke 37192]

OK so you're editing the album, not one of the tracks. Do any of the tracks in the album have those genres assigned in the metadata editor?

[Gunther123 1]

Yes, the tracks are also ID3 tagged. This is track 1 of that same album:

[Luke 37192]

OK so that confirms it. The data in this example all came from the tracks. It couldn't have come from internet metadata because Emby Server doesn't have any internet metadata features at the individual track level.

Then you see those genres at the album level due to their presence in the tracks.

[Gunther123 1]

So, what is the purpose of the green padlock?

Do I have to change every track on every album? There are like 8000 tracks there? Surely not?

Why can I not make a custom genre? Does the custom genre fail because none of the underlying tracks qualify?

 

[Luke 37192]

Just now, Gunther123 said:

So, what is the purpose of the green padlock?

 

If you lock the genres at the album level, then you wont' get genres from internet metadata and you also wont' get them automatically populated from the tracks. 

To me, that will turn it into a hassle because then you'll have to manually assign your album genres. Edit: I can see that the 4.7 server is not respecting the album lock in regards to inheriting genres from tracks. This has been corrected already in the 4.8 beta channel. But again, this will create a lot of manual work for you so I wouldn't recommend it anyway. Better to get those genres out of the tracks to begin with.

[Luke 37192]

3 minutes ago, Gunther123 said:

 

Why can I not make a custom genre?

 

You can, but I think it's probably getting lost from the album due to what I just mentioned above.

[Gunther123 1]

Ok. I thought about this some more and it makes sense, now. If I am wrong, correct me... I am making a genre from the album itself, but the songs underneath are not in this genre, that means the album is in the genre and no songs, therefore the error message is correct, although could be worded better - there are no songs to play with this genre.

I understand that. I guess from my perspective, I assumed a change at album level would flow to contained songs.

The fix is to NOT make changes at album level, but to go back to MP3Tag or some utility and retag the songs. I did a quick test and this seems true.

Thank you for your help and time I think this issue is understood.

As above, maybe there should be some change suggested:

- The error message wording can be clear as above.

- Making a change at album level should come with a warning that underlying songs are not included automatically.

- Maybe in the future, it can be that Emby modifies the underlying songs (after a cautionary message) to match at the album or artist level changes.

Again, thank you for the help and sharing of knowledge.

[Luke 37192]

HI, yes there are improvements that can be made here. Thanks for the feedback.

[Gunther123 1]

I finally got everything to do everything as I wished.

In case anybody else is as anal as I about their music and you come here, this is what I did:

Retagged the genre as I wished, using '\\' as a separator for multiple genres using MP3Tag:

Uploaded to a folder on my server. 

Check the ownership and permissions are 775 for the user under which the emby image runs and root:

Removed the Music library.

Restarted emby

Added the music library.

Now it does not interfere with genre and I can see all the genres as I wished. 

When I retagged everything, I made sure to precede the genre with a '_' character so I know it's mine. This way I can easily see what is broken and what is my work.

If I scan the library or metadata it still stays as I wish, so for me, the places that gave me trouble must be that the database somehow remembers something about the folder or filename regardless if the file is deleted and recreated.

As a side note, but important for all: Where I live, it is possible to legally rip physical media you own, to a digital format.

 

[Luke 37192]

Hi, what metadata stood still?