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How to correct Album Artists now in Emby?


ryandavidg

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ryandavidg

(It's been a while since I visited the forum or upgraded Emby, as I had my music collection working smoothly, but now that I've rebuilt my library on a new machine I've run into these issues with the same folders/albums that worked fine before. Searching the forum for reports of similar problems it seems musicbrainz info is now used in preference to underlying tags, but if this is incorrect please advise.)

 

tl;dr Built a new library on the latest Emby for Windows, now have some incorrect album artists. How do we fix this now? Underlying tags correct, changed musicbrainz links, no amount of refreshing or rescanning makes any difference to how the album is displayed.

 

I know that there have been many problems over the years with incorrect tags, whether different versions of ID3 tags, ID3 tags in FLAC files, or extended tags. I posted in many of those threads and advised others on how to sort things out with the help of apps like mp3tag. I can understand that the devs may have become frustrated by this and prioritised musicbrainz links and info, but at least with the reliance on tags I knew that if I sorted out the tags correctly and refreshed then the album would come up correctly, a couple of stubborn cases requiring the album to be removed and added back to the library. But now that I've moved to a new library on a new machine I'm at a loss on how to fix incorrect album artists.

 

Some of the problems I saw in my new library I could get around, eg: my Thelonious Monk albums were all credited to an ensemble of 5 names, although the musicbrainz links seemed correct. I could just rename that album artist to Thelonious Monk in Emby and everything looks fine. But other problems are more intractable. For example, I have albums that are by "Sasha" and others by "Sasha & John Digweed" which were displayed fine in my old server, but now are all credited to just "Sasha". Obviously I can't rename "Sasha" to "Sasha & John Digweed" as I need the separate Sasha entries. My FLAC tags are fine, but I went though them again to be sure in mp3tag. No extended or id3 tags present, and I even tried changing it to "Sasha and John Digweed" just to be sure, even though I have others with ampersands that are fine. Nothing helped.

 

Then looked into the musicbrainz links where it seems the problem originates. This is how Emby initially recognised the album:

 

MusicBrainz Album ID: 1ffb6295-5f1b-46e1-a952-e6a0a020f310 - Links to "Northern Exposure: Expeditions ~ Release by Sasha & John Digweed "
MusicBrainz Album Artist ID: 68be8273-cb12-4053-964d-157b7e5cf265 - Links to "Sasha (UK DJ/producer Alexander Paul Coe)"
MusicBrainz Release Group ID: ca2c5965-4f54-3171-99a1-239845cbfefe - Links to "Northern Exposure: Expeditions ~ Release group by Sasha & John Digweed"

I corrected the Album Artist to:
MusicBrainz Album Artist ID: 95162abf-5128-4c88-ae79-5cd6f5f81a9f - Links to "Sasha & John Digweed"
 

But no amount of refreshing, rescanning or even restarting Emby makes any change to how the album is recognised and displayed. It still comes up as this:

 

dUFiPId4_o.png

 

These are the tags:

 

f6MVzNeq_o.png

 

Please advise on how I can fix this? I've run out of ideas. Removing the album from the library, rescanning and then adding it back obviously has no effect now, it just comes back identically to before. This is all quite frustrating for content that was working fine before.

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ryandavidg

Ok, an update. Ran a few more scans as I was adding more to the library the next day (today) and now I have two album artists named 'Sasha', and this one has info from 'Sasha and John Digweed' so I guess I can manually rename it in Emby like I did with Thelonious Monk without affecting the albums requiring just 'Sasha' as an album artist. Not the most elegant, but I guess this will be my new process, making sure links point to different album artists or groups, waiting until it changes in the library even if it takes a few scans and some time, manually renaming

 

At least it's something that seems to work.

 

RCF6mDvb_o.png

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ryandavidg

Possibly my last post on this issue. Despite my best efforts things are still a mess.

 

- This is the view of my albums sorted by 'album artist'. In the past, the 'Sasha' albums would be grouped together, then the 'Sasha & CJ Mackintosh', then the 'Sasha & John Digweed' etc. Now they are all jumbled together and no matter how I fiddle with the album artists and their sort titles everything is just mixed together.

- I can find no MusicBrainz artist references for collaborations like 'Sasha & Dave Seaman' and 'Sasha & Maria', so despite my albums being tagged with these names Emby still has them just listed under 'Sasha'. There doesn't seem to be any way to correct this and make it use the tag or manually change it, deleting the incorrect MusicBrainz link to 'Sasha' and rescanning does nothing. I guess I'm supposed to sign up to MusicBrainz and create new groups for all the issues like this in my collection of over 1000 cds I've ripped over the years as that's the only way I've found to fix this? Surely some way of using underlying tags like in the past would be more practical, or at least the option in troublesome cases.

 

Gqo8nQhY_o.png

 

I think I give up at this point. Last year I had plans to move all my movies and live TV to Emby and start using it much more. Then some changes with little warning or explanation broke a number of things and I took a break from trying to sort it out, although at least there I understood that the work on the underlying systems would improve performance in the longer run. But now I can't even get a music library sorted out any more, so I feel like I'm just going backwards. Frustrating.

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d00zah

Even if all the Sasha albums are lumped together, adding 'Sasha & Dave Seaman', 'Sasha & Maria', etc. to the 'Sort title' metadata field might be worth a try?

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ryandavidg

Even if all the Sasha albums are lumped together, adding 'Sasha & Dave Seaman', 'Sasha & Maria', etc. to the 'Sort title' metadata field might be worth a try?

 

Thanks for the response. I've definitely tried adding those sort titles to the album artists, which hasn't changed anything unfortunately. Not sure if you mean on the albums themselves but doubt putting anything different in 'sort title' there would be a good move as I guess it would mess up the order when looking at the albums sorted by title, and not help with my issue when they are sorted by album artist.

 

I realise Emby cannot be all things to all people so I probably need to temper my rather frustrated comments, even if it's difficult after a few days of wrestling with this stuff. But what I wanted, and Emby used to provide, was to respect the way I had tagged my media while adding information where it could. When it couldn't add anything for some reason I was happy to fill in the blanks, like making custom fanart in photoshop for some jazz ensembles. Now it seems to have transformed into something where it decides how things should be named and sorted and - even if they are incorrect and lead to the mess shown above - there is no practical way to correct it.

 

Can't see how this is an improvement, honestly, unless they were just really sick of answering questions from people who had incorrect tags or who had built up collections from... multiple sources with different tagging standards. Hope there was a lot of testing on the MusicBrainz data before deciding to place so much reliance on it.

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ryandavidg

I looked into whether I could sign up on MusicBrainz and create the groups I need, and spent a few hours reading their documentation. Here are my findings:

 

- It's clear that Emby's system of (apparently) pulling "album artist" from the first artist listed on an album on MusicBrainz will not work with collaborations, as they now tend to be listed on MusicBrainz as two different artists with joining phrase such as "feat' or "&". Emby needs to pull in both/all artists in this case. (see here for the Sasha & Maria collaboration: https://musicbrainz.org/release/fce76549-94b6-4908-971d-20f6554a5ac9 which Emby just credits to Sasha).

 

- That artist I found for "Sasha & John Digweed" is not linked to albums as it is a relic from before MusicBrainz adopted their current artist credit system so I very much doubt whether taking the time to create lots of similar combination artist entries would be approved by their editors. Here are snippets from the documentation:

 

"While browsing MusicBrainz, you might find collaborations that are entered as a single artist, instead of as two or more artists linked with join phrases. This can be due to them having been entered before we had the new artist credit system, or to editors just doing it wrong."

"If X and Y collaborate as "X & Y" a new artist should not be created, as we can simply credit it as "X" & "Y" through artist credits."

"If there are several artists, like for example in a collaboration, you can add them by using the "Add Artist Credit" button and entering their names like in the step before."

 

- Further details and the process for entering a collaboration in MusicBrainz here: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Artist_Credits

 

I can only hope someone from Emby notices this post and takes a look at how collaborations in MusicBrainz currently feed into Album Artist in Emby. The current approach simply does not work and there seems to be no way for a user to fix erroneous entries. Either the logic when it comes to importing multiple artists from MusicBrainz needs to be improved, or we need an option in the metadata editor to correct it or allow tags to take precedence for that album.

 

Thanks for your time.

Edited by ryandavidg
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ryandavidg

No response from the Emby team then? I realise you may not want to wade through all my frustrated posts above, as you probably get plenty of those in this forum, but I hope you at least consider the last one as if Emby is going to rely on musicbrainz data to this extent then surely the issue of how they handle artists on their side is relevant.

Edited by ryandavidg
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  • 5 weeks later...

I understand your pain. I have recently being going through the same thing and have not had much success - either with getting things correct or getting any responce form the Emby team. Whilst the musicbrainz tags seems a good idea as you say Emby does not handle collaborations well and there is no way to override this as in the past. 

 

I managed to get my album artists to a workable level all but gave up when trying to get Artists to be meaningful and without duplicates. Emby music management is still lagging behind the movie side of things and seems to get less attention/focus.

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  • 1 month later...
skidmarks

I understand your pain. I have recently being going through the same thing and have not had much success - either with getting things correct or getting any responce form the Emby team. Whilst the musicbrainz tags seems a good idea as you say Emby does not handle collaborations well and there is no way to override this as in the past. 

 

I managed to get my album artists to a workable level all but gave up when trying to get Artists to be meaningful and without duplicates. Emby music management is still lagging behind the movie side of things and seems to get less attention/focus.

Agreed

 

 

Using this tool to pre-groom has worked for me: https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

 

I was having all of the same issues you were.

 

I assume that would work very well.  You are basically adding the musicbrainz ID's before introducing the music to the emby scrapper.  I was using picard for a short time myself.  Unfortunately i put 1000's of hours into mp3tag to make sure my library was squeaky clean.  Doing this all over again to make sure all my music has musicbrainz ID's is more than likely not going to happen.  If the OP has found an issue of how we age getting meta from musicbrainz i would hope, and expect, the emby gurus to at least look into this.

Edited by skidmarks
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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...
ryandavidg

Hi - Thanks for the response. Not sure if this means you read my post above about how Emby (incorrectly) creates album artists with ensembles/groups, where it just pulls in the first artist on musicbrainz ("X" from "X & Y"), but I read your comments in the thread you linked and there is no reference to this situation. So I guess you were responding to other replies here and not the issue I raised in this thread?

 

Please at least consider allowing us an option to rely on our tags for album artists. Would that be so bad?

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I corrected the Album Artist to:

MusicBrainz Album Artist ID: 95162abf-5128-4c88-ae79-5cd6f5f81a9f - Links to "Sasha & John Digweed"

 

 

How did you do this?

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ryandavidg

Thanks for replying. From my experience as outlined in this thread it seems Emby now relies on musicbrainz for album artists and not underlying tags, eg where I have album artist tags like "Sasha & Maria" but Emby now pulls the first artist off the musicbrainz page and puts it in "Sasha". This was working fine in older versions of Emby, this was a new library created from scratch with the same tags that worked fine before.

 

How did you do this?

That was me changing the link in the Emby metadata editor to point to a different album artist on musicbrainz which correctly referenced the group. But as I found out later this was a dead end, as according to musicbrainz documentation this is a relic of an outdated way of doing things on their site, no "x & y" groups should be made for collaborations but two artists should be combined as "x" & "y". So I couldn't create the groups I need on their site, and Emby only seems to pull in the "x" in that situation.

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