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Duplicate music artists entries, how to get rid of them?


M Smith

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skidmarks

This is a catch 22 work around for the artist explosion on our servers.  You lose all the great info musicbrainz supplies, but you gain a clean library (if there are duplicates it pretty much means you have a local meta issue).

 

I am hoping that this doesn't get thrown to simmer on the back burner of finding out why emby and musicbrainz aren't seeing "eye to eye".  So we can utilize musicbrainz in the near future and get back all that great information that it does provide.

Edited by skidmarks
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skidmarks

I am pretty sure i caught in the thread running in the beta server section that someone had found what they thought was the issue with the artist tag that was causing the duplicates?  I'll find and re-read that thread.

 

Then i read its the way musicbrainz handles various artist albums?  That it is beyond anything that can be resolved by you guys.  I have no clue!  I don't recall this being an issue in years past...

 

But again, this stuff if out of my wheel house.  I'm re-scanning my library with lastFM fetcher installed now.  See if that provides additional useful meta (with audiodb). 

 

I'm going to shovel snow.  Yay!

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skidmarks

Each of these providers are excellent sources with great databases.  Strangely enough though when running albums thru mp3tag almost every album that musicbrainz doesn't have information on discogs almost always does.  I have never added anything to musicbrainz, but have and do add albums to discogs.  If you read that discogs is run by a dictator and the mods are hard on data submissions, yah that last part is true.  But, because of this, data isn't being added unless its verified and submitted correctly (and checked for duplicates).  That's a plus in my book.  I do not know how or why musicbrainz is allowing every member (or past members) to be added to the Artist tag individually on some albums.  Not happening at discogs.  The only drawback to me is discogs was a place to add vinyl collections.  Albums have two sides obviously.  So vinyl track numbers are A1 A2 and so on for tracks on the A side and B1 B2 and so one for tracks on the B side.  But i think there are more audiophiles here, better albums data (real vinyl data) and a larger LP database.

 

I started using musicbrainz more and more.  MusicBrainz Picard was used to supply IDS so my music integrated into emby better.  But i dont think they are as strict with the submissions as discogs is.  Or they are over complicating tags?

 

It was just a suggestion and thats what the forums are for.

 

TVMaze also seems to be more reliable than the TVDB lately.  Even before their recent issues.  https://www.tvmaze.com/api

Edited by skidmarks
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jlambie

+1 for the usefulness of Discogs over here. I also have added my collection to there so I am a big fan. In terms of tagging audio files, I have tagged my entire collection using the Discogs plug-in within Media Monkey. Correct, comprehensive tagging every time.

 

I am fairly new to Music Brainz so can only reference my own experience of it not matching as much of my audio in Emby - mismatches in several cases and all. It has been handy for sure but I would anticipate Discogs would do a better job.

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  • 2 months later...
swandruski

I would like to put in a vote for a more reliable data source like Discogs. I think media programs like Plex and Emby have spent a long time focusing on movies and very little time really looking at making them top notch music players. Emby does a good job as a music player. I like the player interface better than Plex, the cycling backgrounds while the music is playing is a nice touch, and it seems to handle my high resolution multi-channel audio nicely, especially with my nVidia Shield client. But as this thread has illustrated, the tagging is easily messed up, and getting the right artist pictures and overviews is inconsistent at best. For those of us with hundreds of artists and thousands of albums, this becomes a major pain in the butt to fill in manually. And I would bet that most of the people with large collections also have very eclectic collections with artists that are not found by the popular services. But I have never been unable to find an artist in Discogs. Proper album naming and tagging also becomes an issue when you have multiple versions of a particular album, e.g., the initial release, the remaster with bonus tracks, the 2CD deluxe edition, the expanded edition with a bonus music only DVD, the new stereo remix plus 5.1 surround mixes. In these cases, using the proper cover art for the correct version helps more quickly identify them visually (and is more accurate in the catalog). Discogs will have a separate entry for each one.

 

Please consider a more accurate and less glitchy data source like Discogs as an option. With a little work, Emby could be the best music server/player in this price range.

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jlambie

I agree with you about the potential for Emby to take the win at this price range for music @@swandruski. I also think adding Discogs as a source would be great - I don’t know however whether, or how, it might fill in the information in the same way MusicBrainz does currently.

 

My two cents - consider manually creating your bespoke music library in Emby. Like you, my music library is sizeable but I have split it by priority of likely use and then I just went for it. Yes, it takes a fair amount of time but so far it is totally worth it IMO. The thing about Emby versus Plex is it is in my experience way more user friendly in terms of manually editing titles, genres, art etc. And the margin for error by inadvertently clicking the wrong setting is far safer in Emby. I copy and paste without any issues and so far everything has remained as I wanted.

 

That probably is not what you wanted to hear, but so far experience also demonstrates for me that no service or software will create the perfect library without at least some manual tweaking being necessary. Believe me, I have tried pretty much all of them. Even Roon, as a ‘premium’ service falls disappointingly short. Coincidentally it also is based on MusicBrainz. So I am not sure it’s a case of a data source being the only or main solution for the ultimate library.

 

Beyond my ken, but NFO metadata files are another way to customise your library. I have spent too much time manually sorting things the way I want them to start from scratch though. And I don’t know how to make them work in Emby.

 

The other thing is that library integrity depends on how well your files are tagged. So far I can recommend Media Monkey which does use Discogs as a tagging source. Run your library through this and that’s part of the task done. Yes, Emby still needs to recognise the files via MusicBrainz but there on in you can manually edit. Ditto for artwork. The modern shots of artists as they are now is a bugbear of mine so I tend to source 70s images for Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan, for example.

 

Media Monkey uses all available tagging fields so in theory it can also import comments etc relevant to specific releases - but I don’t know whether - or how - Emby may be able to import or display these. Emby mods and those in the know will be able to advise.

 

The other issue I have raised elsewhere on the forums is the display of album info in (specifically my case) the iOS apps, both being able to see it and then this being easily readable - paragraphs instead of huge blocks of text. These queries have been replied to in the forums.

 

Anyhow, my two cents. Manual editing isn’t so bad, and once done, it’s done. I like what I have done with it so far.

Edited by jlambie
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I'm actually using both Plex + Emby on the same libraries and would like them to play nice together. I want users to have the ability to decide which they prefer to purchase. The problem with tagging (even manual tagging) is that neither likes the other's tags. (I think they reverse the function of Artists and Album Artist.) Since I've been running Plex longest, and have it pretty clean, I've given it tagging preference. At this point, I'm just telling users to deal with what's there. It's not like they're paying me for all of this work. I seldom use the servers for local or mobile use. They're just setup for a small number of family/friends convenience to open my audio libraries up to. I could never get them to use ssh -- so I made it easy on them with something they could deal with.

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swandruski

Thanks for the comments @jlambie. I agree that manual entry isn't bad once you get used to the process. The web version of the app makes this fairly convenient and manual entry does give you more control. Also with a lot of out of the way artists, no program is going to find everything - though interestingly, Plex seemed to find a few that Emby didn't. Interesting to hear that Roon doesn't do a better job. Given the price I would expect it to come to my house, rip everything for me, tag it and vacuum the floors too!

 

I'll give Media Monkey a try. I had been using Windows Media Player or the Zune software (yes I have a Zune and it is great - Microsoft just couldn't market their way out of a paper bag) and WMA files, but I am slowly switching to other programs and ripping things to FLAC. Between a new car stereo with more capabilities, setting up the media server, and my Zune battery slowly dying, it's time to move on.

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skidmarks

Thanks for the comments @jlambie. I agree that manual entry isn't bad once you get used to the process. The web version of the app makes this fairly convenient and manual entry does give you more control. Also with a lot of out of the way artists, no program is going to find everything - though interestingly, Plex seemed to find a few that Emby didn't. Interesting to hear that Roon doesn't do a better job. Given the price I would expect it to come to my house, rip everything for me, tag it and vacuum the floors too!

 

I'll give Media Monkey a try. I had been using Windows Media Player or the Zune software (yes I have a Zune and it is great - Microsoft just couldn't market their way out of a paper bag) and WMA files, but I am slowly switching to other programs and ripping things to FLAC. Between a new car stereo with more capabilities, setting up the media server, and my Zune battery slowly dying, it's time to move on.

 

Microsoft really screwed the marketing up on that device!  I had a few of them and were, in my opinion, FAR more superior.  The Zune software was amazing at that period in time, providing great "eye candy" when playing music.

 

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jlambie

Thanks for the comments @jlambie. I agree that manual entry isn't bad once you get used to the process. The web version of the app makes this fairly convenient and manual entry does give you more control. Also with a lot of out of the way artists, no program is going to find everything - though interestingly, Plex seemed to find a few that Emby didn't. Interesting to hear that Roon doesn't do a better job. Given the price I would expect it to come to my house, rip everything for me, tag it and vacuum the floors too!

 

I'll give Media Monkey a try. I had been using Windows Media Player or the Zune software (yes I have a Zune and it is great - Microsoft just couldn't market their way out of a paper bag) and WMA files, but I am slowly switching to other programs and ripping things to FLAC. Between a new car stereo with more capabilities, setting up the media server, and my Zune battery slowly dying, it's time to move on.

Just talking about my own mileage here, but Roon only managed to provide reviews for 60% of my albums, had no biographies for over 20% of my artists, and no photos for nearly 40% of the artists in my library! And I wouldn’t say my musical tastes were excessively niche. So yes, rolling your own in Emby (or Plex) isn’t such a terrible prospect in comparison!

 

Of course, where Plex differs from Emby is in having Tidal on board. Ultimately I guess I would like to have minimal streaming as I do prefer to own my music, but it is handy to be able to borrow. I wonder whether Emby would ever explore getting a streaming service to partner up with.

 

And I have no idea what Zune is, must have a look!

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mickle026

What I think the creator of the issue with duplicates is (and this is just my experiences), if there is a music brainz id for any artist on the audio cd tags, and the cd has a differing album artist tag then it creates a duplicate for that artist with the music brainz id.

 

The easy way to find the offending albums is to click the duplicate and a list will appear underneath : Albums >

Open these albums in an mp3 tag editor and remove any individual musicbranz tags that refer to an artist or track rather than the album.

 

Rescan the album in Emby and Voila the duplicates dissapear!

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  • 2 weeks later...

New Emby user here, long time discogs user.

 

I have discovered possibly a new reason for the duplicate artists issue, at least I couldn't find reference on the forums for this being discovered. I have duplicate artists due to some of my files having Discogs IDs in them vs some with MusicBrainz IDs. I have tagged my files using Beets with Discogs as the data source however the Discogs support in Beets was updated along the way and some of my files have Discogs IDs in them and some have MusicBrainz IDs. The most noticable for me is with Various albums, the Discogs ID for Various is 194 and MusicBrainz has for some reason matched this with Diplo. I actually have Diplo in my collection so I have two entries for Diplo but one of them is populated by Various albums with Discogs artist ID 194.

 

From the start I wasn't going to trust Musicbrainz so when I imported my library I told it to use local metadata because I know my data is good. For the most part the data looks good but the other issue is incorrect artist images which I assume Emby is sourcing based on IDs? So the artist image it shows for Diplo is correct, but my Various Artist albums it displays the name Diplo but shows the artist image and logo for a group called "Hawthorne Heights".

 

I also vote for adding Discogs as a metadata provider. I have contributed a lot of data myself.

 

5e56061626ce2_diplo1.jpg

 

5e560625b8aea_diplo2.jpg

Edited by zetetic
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  • 1 month later...

For those who came to the end of the thread for the solution and don't want to read through, the following steps should fix most of your issues. If any remain, double check that the files are tagged properly (exactly the same artist name, no funky extended tags, etc...).

  1. Uninstall the Musicbrainz plugin
  2. Restart the server
  3. Scan Library Files
  4. Refresh Metadata

This fixed 95% of my issues, the rest being actual tagging issues that were easy to find and fix once the other duplicates were removed.

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  • 8 months later...
iamanoffering

Still experiencing similar issues that I'm trying to resolve.

I was getting duplicate artists when marking tracks in compilation albums. For instance, the track is originally labeled as "Artist & Artist." I change it to "Artist; Artist" so that the 'Appears On' section works properly. However - this creates duplicate artists instead the 'Appears On' functionality doesn't really work. Which is a bummer, as I love seeing all the albums my artists are on.

I've uninstalled both the MusicBrainz plugin and the AudioDB plugin to attempt to do all of this manually. A separate artist is not being created now - however, the compilation album that I was editing doesn't appear in the 'Appears On' section still. Thoughts?

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1 hour ago, iamanoffering said:

Still experiencing similar issues that I'm trying to resolve.

I was getting duplicate artists when marking tracks in compilation albums. For instance, the track is originally labeled as "Artist & Artist." I change it to "Artist; Artist" so that the 'Appears On' section works properly. However - this creates duplicate artists instead the 'Appears On' functionality doesn't really work. Which is a bummer, as I love seeing all the albums my artists are on.

I've uninstalled both the MusicBrainz plugin and the AudioDB plugin to attempt to do all of this manually. A separate artist is not being created now - however, the compilation album that I was editing doesn't appear in the 'Appears On' section still. Thoughts?

Try removing all music and albums from your library for that artist. Then do a full scan of all libraries to clean it out from the database. then add it back. Please see if that helps. thanks.

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iamanoffering

I'm trying the suggestion made earlier of manually updating all of the embedded tags in the files themselves. Tried a couple that I knew were causing problems and this worked brilliantly already. All I had to do was rescan the library files once I updated the tags in the files and voila, it worked.

Trying some tagging software now as well that I found - https://www.mp3tag.de/en/dodownload.html. Looks promising.

Seems like if Emby has the right tags to begin with it's perfect, so that's the way to go.

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I've dozens of duplicate artists, where the duplicate has no song or album listed. All share the same artist name but different and invalid musicbrainz ids. I noticed that emby recognizes a tag which "musicbrainz id, musicbrainz id" as one musicbrainz id and creates a  new artist. That seems like a bug to me,  what do you think @Luke

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1 hour ago, Oceanus said:

I've dozens of duplicate artists, where the duplicate has no song or album listed. All share the same artist name but different and invalid musicbrainz ids. I noticed that emby recognizes a tag which "musicbrainz id, musicbrainz id" as one musicbrainz id and creates a  new artist. That seems like a bug to me,  what do you think @Luke

We'd have to look at an example. Thanks.

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Happy2Play
7 hours ago, Oceanus said:

I've dozens of duplicate artists, where the duplicate has no song or album listed. All share the same artist name but different and invalid musicbrainz ids. I noticed that emby recognizes a tag which "musicbrainz id, musicbrainz id" as one musicbrainz id and creates a  new artist. That seems like a bug to me,  what do you think @Luke

This suggest mismatching of linked data as correcting or removing invalid ids should resolve the issue.  But specific examples would be good.

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