General music library/music player/music metadata overhaul

[MindBullet 56]

Hey there guys,

in my opinion Emby is the best option to host a personal media server and I think many might agree, that one of it's outstanding features is the performance in terms of streaming. Also, Emby doesn't have as much bloatware, which i.e. Plex does. It's not as fancy or probably not visually as appealing as Plex, but it has most of the features that really matter, rather than features that nobody needs or uses.

However, I think one big flaw is the current (Not so current, eh?) state of the music library, its performance and its features. Please read the following with knowing that it's a subjective point of view, but there might be others agreeing.

While Plex music libraries probably evolved into the probably best music experience for audiophiles, Emby's music experience is several quantum leaps behind.

Things that would drastically improve the music experience on Emby - still very subjective - would be:

- Improve metadata matching. Large music libraries (50.000 songs and above) feel the real pain of 20-35% of artists not being matched correctly or rather not at all

- Music player overhaul. The player looks clunky, outdated, is featureless and even worse: Even lacks essential rudimental features almost every music player has since 2015. Sidenote and not to trigger anybody, but to be honest it reminds me of a visually less appealing version of Winamp from 2002. Features like "smart shuffle", "accoustical analysis", "smart(er) playlists" or at least "smart suggestions" is just a quick idea of features it could have. While Plex has introduced AI into their standard repertoire, Emby doesn't have a "repeat 1 song" feature in their music player web app...

- Media presentation rework. Rather than throwing everything into one clotted spot (like albums at once in 1 overview, songs at once in 1 overview), differentiate between Albums, Compilations, Live Albums, Singles, etc. as I proposed here

Please consider this as one of the bigger feature requests, but over all I'm still very happy with Emby. It's outperforming others in most areas, but the state of music libraries - and I'm talking about libs with more than 100 albums - is my biggest arch enemy and which is the only reason I keep my music on Plex exclusively without creating a music library on Emby.

I'm quite sure there's a bunch of Embynauts that potentially would agree with me. And if not, it's just me

Thank you for all the hard work over the past decades, which always dragged me back to Emby, coming to find that it might lack one or two things, but is still the best option compared to the competition.

Edited February 15 by MindBullet

[MindBullet 56]

For those not knowing about Plex' music player or Plexamp, just for visualisation purposes:

You can get an idea of what other players are capable of. In this photo just a glimpse is illustrated

[MindBullet 56]

Googling a bit I came across this 

seems like the project is on hold or even EOL, but something like this is exactly what Emby needs imo

[Luke 37082]

Quote

- Improve metadata matching. Large music libraries (50.000 songs and above) feel the real pain of 20-35% of artists not being matched correctly or rather not at all
 

Hi there, let's look at a specific example:

How to Report a Problem

Thanks !

[Luke 37082]

54 minutes ago, MindBullet said:

For those not knowing about Plex' music player or Plexamp, just for visualisation purposes:

You can get an idea of what other players are capable of. In this photo just a glimpse is illustrated

The first screenshot looks a lot like ours except for the visualization in the seek bar.

The second screenshot also looks a lot like ours except for the colored background.

 

[arrbee99 1560]

Or

for Android types.

[user24 90]

Hi  @MindBullet, being a reasonably new Embynaut with a largish music library (8000+ albums, 100,000+ songs) I understand the overall sentiment. Any and all improvements the Emby team make to music management and playback are greatly appreciated. I’ve been posting a few ideas, here and there, as I’ve been discovering how best to set up my music.

My experience with metadata matching is as follows:

• Plex messed up approx. 50% of my library organisation when importing.
• Emby messed up approx. 5% of my library organisation when importing.

Plex was bad with renaming artist names and changing multi-disc album groupings,

For me that was enough of a reason not to use Plex and keep trying Emby.

With both systems, 20-30% of the artists have no info. With many artists, Emby shows no artist image and/or no overview info, despite finding the relevant links to MusicBrainz, Discogs, etc. So, when I go to MusicBrainz, Discogs I find there is no info to import, just a placeholder page – so, in some cases, there is not too much Emby can likely do??? Sometimes the imported Discogs info is incorrect, but i just shrug and update those entries manually.

Anyone who has a large library likely has 20-30% obscure artists, beyond the popular mainstream. Sometimes I have spent hours trying to find an album cover or artist bio online, sometimes with no success. When it stops being fun and starts being work, then I using give up and go do something else!

Direct links to artist Wikipedia pages and/or official artist websites could be useful perhaps? Is that technically feasible and/or legally allowed?

The media presentation artwork – Albums, Compilations, etc. is a good one that I agree with. If we tell  @Luke that Apple Music use it, he might give it some love and attention!

My suggested groupings would be:

• Studio Albums
• Live Albums
• Compilations
• Singles & Eps
• ·Other

My top music improvement idea (in case you haven't seen it) is:

 

I'm going to play some music now...

P. S. I think that the audiophiles use (the expensive) Roon, rather than Plex.

(BTW - Emby has folders, Roon has only just decided to implement them.)

Edited February 16 by user24
added P.S . section at bottom

[ebr 14916]

Hi.  Aren't there at least two or three broad general request like this for music?  Could we please keep that discussion in one topic? @GrimReapercan you help find the others and merge?

Thanks.

[GrimReaper 3301]

9 minutes ago, ebr said:

can you help find the others and merge?

Will do, once in front of a PC. 

[user24 90]

On 2/16/2024 at 11:35 AM, user24 said:

Direct links to artist Wikipedia pages and/or official artist websites could be useful perhaps? Is that technically feasible and/or legally allowed?

For anyone else that may be interested in this, I have now discovered how to implement it, by using the following plug-in:

 

[slyfox 42]

+1 I use Emby for all my video media, but it is a very painful experience when it comes to Music. The UI is clunky, and there are no features (e.g., smart playlists or filters).

Plexamp is the only reason why I am still running a Plex server.

Edited February 21 by slyfox

[Luke 37082]

34 minutes ago, slyfox said:

+1 I use Emby for all my video media, but it is a very painful experience when it comes to Music. The UI is clunky, and there are no features (e.g., smart playlists or filters).

Plexamp is the only reason why I am still running a Plex server.

Hi, why do you think there are no filters? There are filters all over the user interface.

[slyfox 42]

2 minutes ago, Luke said:

Hi, why do you think there are no filters? There are filters all over the user interface.

You are correct. There are some filters. However, there is no filter ti distinguish between played/unplayed tracks. No way to save filtered views for quick access to favourite Genres.

I think that this can be solved with the Smart Playlists (fitlers) feature.