Music Tagging & Multiple Artists

[tmb4016 86]

Hi All,

 

I am after a little bit of advice on how best to tag my music library particularly with regard to multiple artists. 

 

As background the music library is organised as Music\AlbumArtist\Album\songs … This works well and in conjunction with tagging the files using typically picard with sanity checks provided by mp3tag I've got all areas of the music library presented well and as I want. I've ensured that the albumartist tags are unique so if there is a joint credit - I've only tagged and organised by main album artist. I was leaving the joint credits to the artist tag and this is where I am running into difficulty.

 

I cannot seem to get consistent behaviour... and I am getting double entries and also some missing entries with the way it is tagged. 

 

I obvious have something wrong can anyone suggest the best way from picard to tag multiple artists. 

 

Thanks in advance 

[Luke 36999]

@@ginjaninja how do  you tag your files?

[ginjaninja 533]

you may need to confirm the version of emby you are using as i think something changed recently where picard mbzid tags now take highest priority.

 

take this with a pinch of salt, but my understanding of priority for artist extraction from tags in emby 4.2 is

 

artist<artists<MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID

 

i use picard...

however i run a post filter on the output of picard via an mp3tag script to convert all linking words to emby's '/' separator eg vs. feat. featuring. with. (this is no longer necessary in 4.2 as mbzid tags take priority)

my tracks for multiple artists in mp3tag look like (as an example) ..

 

Artist=Katalyst;Stephanie McKay

Artists=Katalyst/Stephanie McKay

MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID=dec865b0-35e5-4291-b76d-020e5b524db3/719b2af7-d7ea-4ab4-b82e-d429d08e1a27

 

you may need to expand on 'double entries' and  ' missing entries' i am not 100% following..

 

FWIW emby DOES support multiple album artists

again

ALBUMARTIST<ALBUMARTISTS<MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID

eg.

ALBUMARTIST=Robert Plant & Alison Krauss

ALBUMARTISTS=Robert Plant/Alison Krauss (The '/' was required prior to 4.2 as the mbzid was not read/given highest priority - if you wanted Emby to detect Multiple Album Artists as they register  on Musicbrainz)

MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID=bd53f9a7-8be9-46b0-bf7d-1deea3cb57bc/6b064ead-91a4-4ac8-8076-b1febe4f4aac

 

FWIW i use the following picard script to write out albumartists tag, but i dont think thats overly significant to your issue.

$setmulti(albumartists,%_albumartists%)

 

hope this helps..

i can clarify further if thats as clear as mud..

[tmb4016 86]

Apologies for the delay in reply - I've been out all week... 

 

Thanks for the information. I will check on the metadata as I am not sure how the different artists are split at the moment. I will check things out a bit before I detail and specific issues as I am sure a lot are connected with dodgy entries in the Artis or Musicbrainz_artistid fields.

 

I am on 4.2.0.32 for reference so Musicbrainz tags should take preference if I understand correctly

 

Thanks again - will probably be back....

[tmb4016 86]

ok done an initial check on one example … David Guetta - MusicBrainzID- 302bd7b9-d012-4360-897a-93b00c855680. 

 

I have two of his Albums and they appear fine under his id not problem. Issue is then with some Various Artist albums on which he appears with other artists. In this case he has 3 tracks one on each of Now 81, Now 83 and Now 85 all of which are tagged fully however I am seeing some inconsistencies in how these show in artists.

 

Now 81 & Now 85 are listed under his artist section in the appears on - as expected. There is however another David Guetta artist which only shows the Now 83 track and there is also a further David Guetta that has no entries under it for either his albums or tracks. I cannot see any difference in the Now 83 track tagging to the other Now tracks …

 

Now 81 - Titanium

• Artist - David Guetta feat.Sia
• Artists - David Guetta; Sia
• MusicBrainz Artist ID - 302bd7b9-d012-4360-897a-93b00c855680; 2f548675-008d-4332-876c-108b0c7ab9c5

Now 83 - She Wolf

• Artist - David Guetta feat. Sia
• Artists - David Guetta; Sia
• MusicBrainz Artist ID - 302bd7b9-d012-4360-897a-93b00c855680; 2f548675-008d-4332-876c-108b0c7ab9c5

Now 85 - Play Hard

• Artist - David Guetta feat. Ne-Yo & Akon
• Artists - David Guetta; Ne-Yo; Akon
• MusicBrainz Artist ID - 302bd7b9-d012-4360-897a-93b00c855680; a4a01f5d-18e7-4571-8c3a-76ec0e24e2d7; 1138a764-2212-4d0a-b02d-0dc14df91e08

The confusing thing is that when I view the Artist for Sia - there is only one I see her own two albums and correctly see appears on entries for Now 81 and Now 83 along with the David Guetta albums which she also appears on.

 

Something is obviously wrong with the Now 83 tagging but I cannot track it down and I cannot identify the cause of the additional Artist David Guetta

[ginjaninja 533]

something may be wrong with tagging, but its also possible emby is not robust at ingesting and displaying music library content. (i believe there is at least one reproducible issue which i have reported)

 

what i would do next is check the metadata in the emby database (edit metadata command) against the david guetta [album]artist objects and tracks, see if you can see something 'interesting'. (that might account for three separate artist objects)

 

maybe the string is different (space/special character?), maybe the mbzid is different/maybe blank, maybe one of the other ids are different.

 

you probably will then need to do some checks on a blank database blank media library. then gradually add albums , scanning one at a time, and check the [album]artist objects that get created. you may find that on a fresh library build the issue is not reproducible - pointing to a database corruption issue perhaps.

 

it may not tell you anything new, but you would then have a small base (with reproducible issue) that you can send to luke for analysis. i use db power amp to convert tracks down to a crap mono bitrate so the files are tiny but still have all their tags for easier upload in a small zip.

feel free to send to me too.

 

its worth the effort imo. 100% correct library ingestion and display is no1 critical foundation of a media library imo. i think luke needs examples to show beyond doubt if there is a robustness issue.

 

fwiw the issue i reported is i believe something caused by two separate id3 [album]artists tags being detected with same mbz id, so probably not related to this.

 

Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

Edited July 19, 2019 by ginjaninja

[tmb4016 86]

Just a quick update to anybody out there with issues with the music library - I finally bit the bullet and tackled the music library Artists in an attempt to remove the Duplicate Artists I was seeing. At the same time investigated the use of two tools I had been using for tagging - Mp3tag and Musicbrainz.

 

I now have a tagged music library with the Album artists and Artists showing how I want with no duplicates and a working process for adding new content without errors. 

 

I am now of the opinion that Emby is doing a pretty good job of identification of the album artists and artists even with multiple artists. There will always be some 'quirks' for people that don't necessarily get identified the way people want them as Emby is using external sources but for those that aren't correct I have found they can be manually corrected easliy.

 

The bulk of the issues I had were down to errors in the tagging and typically these were down to similar duplicate tags or old album.nfo files in the files system. 

 

I used a dev install of emby to trial the albums that were giving me the most grief before I added to my main server and to get an understanding of the way the tags behaved

 

What works for me is to use …

1. MP3tag to clean the data first - this is useful via the Extended Tags as it shows all sorts of oddities. I clean all tags from here that I don't want. 
2.  Musicbrainz Picard to correctly tag the cleaned files.
3. Tweak any personal preferences for the way multiple artists are presented.
4. Load into Emby and check the results of a scan.

 

With this artists are appearing correctly including multiple artists and this then results in the correct display of artists 'Appears on' which is a great feature in my opinion when the data is tagged.

 

Thanks to all who have offered advice on tagging in this thread and others - It took a bit of work but as per other comments imo  it is worth it...

 

Great work Luke & team...

[Luke 36999]

 

 

maybe the mbzid is different

 

if this is happening in your embedded tags, this is not a question of Emby server's robustness. I mean what would you like us to do in this situation?

[Luke 36999]

Just a quick update to anybody out there with issues with the music library - I finally bit the bullet and tackled the music library Artists in an attempt to remove the Duplicate Artists I was seeing. At the same time investigated the use of two tools I had been using for tagging - Mp3tag and Musicbrainz.

 

I now have a tagged music library with the Album artists and Artists showing how I want with no duplicates and a working process for adding new content without errors. 

 

I am now of the opinion that Emby is doing a pretty good job of identification of the album artists and artists even with multiple artists. There will always be some 'quirks' for people that don't necessarily get identified the way people want them as Emby is using external sources but for those that aren't correct I have found they can be manually corrected easliy.

 

The bulk of the issues I had were down to errors in the tagging and typically these were down to similar duplicate tags or old album.nfo files in the files system. 

 

I used a dev install of emby to trial the albums that were giving me the most grief before I added to my main server and to get an understanding of the way the tags behaved

 

What works for me is to use …

1. MP3tag to clean the data first - this is useful via the Extended Tags as it shows all sorts of oddities. I clean all tags from here that I don't want. 
2.  Musicbrainz Picard to correctly tag the cleaned files.
3. Tweak any personal preferences for the way multiple artists are presented.
4. Load into Emby and check the results of a scan.

 

With this artists are appearing correctly including multiple artists and this then results in the correct display of artists 'Appears on' which is a great feature in my opinion when the data is tagged.

 

Thanks to all who have offered advice on tagging in this thread and others - It took a bit of work but as per other comments imo  it is worth it...

 

Great work Luke & team...

 

Thanks for the feedback.