Combine albums in music collection

[beckfield 95]

I am also a former Plex user (I have lifetime memberships for both Plex and Emby).  The main feature that  @tfarrellis asking for is what Plex calls "Merge."  You can select the various albums that should be a single album and merge them.  I have, at times, wished that Emby had this.  But it's important to note that Plex would not write anything back to the embedded tags in the media files either, so if a library had to be rebuilt for any reason, you would end up having to do the merge work again.  Even though it would prevent that re-work, I strongly opposed Plex writing back to my embedded tags, and I also hope that Emby doesn't do it.  The editors that are out there are more than adequate for the job.

Embedded tags are the more "bulletproof" and permanent solution, but it can be a lot of work, if they aren't complete and accurate.  Plex caused me endless headaches until I got my embedded tags in order, including, as has been mentioned here, making sure that "Album Artist" tags are always populated.  Once I did, Plex was nearly bulletproof.

Emby has come a long way and is, in my recent experience (it wasn't always so), comparably reliable to Plex, with the same embedded tags.  Since implementing support for the Composer tag, as well as support for multiple artists per track or album, Emby has surpassed Plex where classical music is concerned.

[tfarrell 13]

Quote

 

The main feature that  @tfarrellis asking for is what Plex calls "Merge."  You can select the various albums that should be a single album and merge them.  I have, at times, wished that Emby had this.

 

In Plex you can merge anything, and it becomes one item with as many parts as it had before. So for example, if you have one video in multiple parts and it is for some reason showing as multiple videos, you can merge it and it becomes one video with multiple parts and you'll see them in order. In Emby you can group videos, but they become different versions of the same video, so if it has part 1 and part 2 you group them, when you watch it you'll only see one of the two parts (which you select from the menu). Grouping is a good feature in that you might want to group different versions of the same thing - like if I have a 3D movie and the 2D version of it, I can group them and they show as one item in content and I select which version I want to see at time of playback  - but you can't group everything, so even when I have 3 versions of the same book I can't group them. 

However, we digress. My problem was that Emby shows individual albums as multiple albums, and I wanted a way to put the album together. Apparently this is caused by the metadata, and correcting the metadata corrects the problem. This does not deal with my underlying issue, that my music collection was created mostly with iTunes, the most popular mp3 program, so if Emby can't deal with that, Emby is failing. Also while I can edit the metadata for a video, I can't edit much of the metadata for a song, and I have to use a third party program to "fix" the metadata for my music collection to make Emby deal with it, which from the perspective of a software engineer means that Emby is being inconsistent (I can do it with videos but I can't do it with audio) so that's another failure.

[Happy2Play 8356]

4 minutes ago, tfarrell said:

However, we digress. My problem was that Emby shows individual albums as multiple albums, and I wanted a way to put the album together. Apparently this is caused by the metadata, and correcting the metadata corrects the problem. This does not deal with my underlying issue, that my music collection was created mostly with iTunes, the most popular mp3 program, so if Emby can't deal with that, Emby is failing

Agree to disagree as this proves you are missing pertinent metadata/tags as are relying on structure.

[tfarrell 13]

1 hour ago, Happy2Play said:

Agree to disagree as this proves you are missing pertinent metadata/tags as are relying on structure.

Assuming that is true (and I have no reason to believe it's not) that indicates that Emby is deliberately choosing to optimize on a factor which a vast percentage of users will find that they're not meeting and has no fallback plan. It's not like it uses the metadata and, if it's not there, looks to see if the information exists as structure. What it does is that it looks at the metadata, and if that's not there it throws its hands up in the air and says "nothing I can do!" no matter how good the structure is.

[Tigga5 0]

17 hours ago, Luke said:

The former is just our old code base from about five years ago, so I know it quite well. It's back from a time when we required a specific folder structure for music, so songs would get lumped into an album just by being in the same folder together.

 

You say that as if it's a bad thing, and as if server owners aren't capable of any logical directory structure on their own. Yet practically every other system I've tried (Plex, Jellyfin, WMC, Navidrome) are able to take the folder structure into account and do a much better job than Emby at auto organizing albums. I've spent a few hours in the past trying to bulk update meta tags and only put a small dent in what would be needed for my collection, so I gave up and made the sensible choice of switching to Jellyfin.

It's like Emby was trying to innovate here for the sake of innovation, while completely ignoring industry standards and leaving everyone else behind.  "Our music system works great! But only as long as your collection is perfectly tuned and setup exactly the way we want".

[ebr 14959]

Hi.  Which of these options did you choose when you setup your music library?

[tfarrell 13]

5 hours ago, ebr said:

Hi.  Which of these options did you choose when you setup your music library?

I really don't remember, it has been 10 or 11 years. Since I didn't know what I was doing, probably I let it use whatever was the default. I just checked, the answer is not presently visible.

[Happy2Play 8356]

Default I believe is as shown unstructured but my understanding that is only relevant to image saving and will have no affect on item split up with no matching AlbumArtist/Album.

 

Edited May 7 by Happy2Play

[Luke 37251]

The folder structure option isn't relevant here unless your "album artist" tags are empty. When they're empty, then this option (if set), will allow the server to use the parent folder name to try and figure it out.

It sounds like your "album artist" values are not empty but rather incorrect, so that's why I don't think changing this option will help you.

 

[Luke 37251]

On 5/6/2024 at 10:24 PM, tfarrell said:

Assuming that is true (and I have no reason to believe it's not) that indicates that Emby is deliberately choosing to optimize on a factor which a vast percentage of users will find that they're not meeting and has no fallback plan. It's not like it uses the metadata and, if it's not there, looks to see if the information exists as structure. What it does is that it looks at the metadata, and if that's not there it throws its hands up in the air and says "nothing I can do!" no matter how good the structure is.

I apologize for the frustration, but we did our homework and what we do is consistent with how most music apps work. Yes, Plex is an exception, I get that.  But try windows media player, itunes, mediamonkey, or roon, and you'll see they are getting the album artist from the embedded metadata just like we are.

I know it seems like a pain in the butt to make these changes to your files, but if you do it once then you'll actually be making your music files work better with a lot of other software besides just Emby.

[tfarrell 13]

23 minutes ago, Luke said:

 

It sounds like your "album artist" values are not empty but rather incorrect, so that's why I don't think changing this option will help you.

 

I've been working on the files with MP3tag as suggested. It seems to be working. In the vast majority of cases, the "album artist" field is blank, not incorrect. 

Anyway I am not seeing a menu option to change it without removing and re-creating my music library. Are you suggesting I have to do so?

24 minutes ago, Luke said:

I apologize for the frustration, but we did our homework and what we do is consistent with how most music apps work. Yes, Plex is an exception, I get that.  But try windows media player, itunes, mediamonkey, or roon, and you'll see they are getting the album artist from the embedded metadata just like we are.

I know it seems like a pain in the butt to make these changes to your files, but if you do it once then you'll actually be making your music files work better with a lot of other software besides just Emby.

Given that the majority of my music files do not have the "album artist" field filled and they were created by iTunes (I ripped my CDs on my iMac when I used to have one and then transferred them to my PC), I think you are mistaken.(A few were created by Amazon, since I recently started buying MP3s from them, and you would be right about those - I don't think they have been a problem.) Also I uploaded my collection to Google Music (now YT Music) and it worked fine as-is.

[tfarrell 13]

(I also uploaded it to Amazon Music and it worked fine, but it's no longer there so I can't check anything there out.) 

[Luke 37251]

Hi, how has this gone?