On the fly changes to music artist names and albums

[jhs39 13]

In Plex if you have artists show up as (for example) Adam Ant; Adam & The Ants; Adam and the Ants; and Ant, Adam--you can go into the web interface and change the artist names on the fly so all of the associated albums get grouped together.  In Emby if you try anything like that the album associated with the artist you changed completely disappears.  There's also no easy way to change the artist info once Emby has it.  Changing the metadata tags and doing a new scan doesn't result in the item being picked up correctly.  I don't understand why the information can't simply be changed in the web interface.  I might also want to group solo albums by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham with my Fleetwood Mac albums.  In Plex it takes 10 seconds.  In Emby, as far as I can tell, it's virtually impossible to do.  I never use Emby for music because of this.  It's a very basic element of functionality that Emby has lacked going back to its Media Browser days.  I don't understand why the music library can't be made more user user-friendly when it comes to making changes to artist and album names.   

Edited September 26, 2016 by jhs39

[Luke 37008]

Hi, it's something we can look into in the future, definitely. For now, the easiest thing to do is update the embedded tags with a music tagger and then Emby will react to the changes with a library scan.

[aspdend 174]

+1 for this from me - this is the sort of functionality that the music implementation would benefit from

[ginjaninja 533]

i prefer that development efforts are expended into a paradigm which expects users to configure their tags correctly.

not because ive gone to the trouble of getting them right... but im confident emby can reindex my library from scratch to a known good position...i would hate to loose all those user configured 'artist joins' (renames) just by reinstalling the server.

 

Im conscious though that emby has a significant issue with orphaning appdata and media folder metadata and creating two artists in the ui ...so i dont think emby is ready to store such 'join' metadata in media folders to allow a complete database rebuild from source.

 

maybe if there was an improved (granular) backup and restore database function to deal with each area (eg watched / unwatched per user, manual configurations of metadata eg in particular 'artist joins', etc)  of the database, users could be expected to suck it up and get used to treating the database as master and move away from 'media folder metadata' completely (which is creaking at the seams it seems in any case). Then id +1 this suggestion on the basis there may be case for an overlay on top of the tags (but id still rather get my tags right :-))