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Metadata Problems - Audio


CathMowr

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  • 2 weeks later...
JosephCameron

I'm in a similar boat to many of the people commenting above. I am new to Emby, and I've gotten just about everything else set up properly, but my music library is the problem.

I've turned off all the services that search for the metadata for my audio files online so that Emby will take the metadata from the files themselves. The problem(s) I'm encountering seem to be randomly occurring. For some artists/albums, Emby does exactly what it should be doing; for other artists, it takes all the songs and puts them into one giant album. For example, it has taken all my Frank Zappa albums and created one "Frank Zappa" album that is 2375 songs long. This would be impossible to sort through manually. However, even manually editing the metadata through Emby doesn't work for two reasons:

  1. I tried manually editing the metadata for an artist that only has two albums, and the changes didn't take. They are still organized in Emby as one album.
  2. If I go to Metadata Manager, I've noticed that the folders for the artists for which the above described problem occurs don't appear. In case I'm not being clear: My entire music library is organized first by folders alphabetized by artist name then within those folders by the name of the individual album. So, for example, the Frank Zappa album Apostrophe would be found this way: music library/artists/Zappa, Frank/Apostrophe. When I look in Metadata Manager, the "Zappa, Frank" folder cannot be found. Nevertheless, my entire Frank Zappa collection can be found in Emby just listed as one giant album. So, I can't even edit the metadata through Metadata Manager.

Has anyone else experienced this problem and, if so, does anyone have any suggestions for how to address this issue?

Thank you in advance.

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Happy2Play
3 minutes ago, JosephCameron said:

I'm in a similar boat to many of the people commenting above. I am new to Emby, and I've gotten just about everything else set up properly, but my music library is the problem.

I've turned off all the services that search for the metadata for my audio files online so that Emby will take the metadata from the files themselves. The problem(s) I'm encountering seem to be randomly occurring. For some artists/albums, Emby does exactly what it should be doing; for other artists, it takes all the songs and puts them into one giant album. For example, it has taken all my Frank Zappa albums and created one "Frank Zappa" album that is 2375 songs long. This would be impossible to sort through manually. However, even manually editing the metadata through Emby doesn't work for two reasons:

  1. I tried manually editing the metadata for an artist that only has two albums, and the changes didn't take. They are still organized in Emby as one album.
  2. If I go to Metadata Manager, I've noticed that the folders for the artists for which the above described problem occurs don't appear. In case I'm not being clear: My entire music library is organized first by folders alphabetized by artist name then within those folders by the name of the individual album. So, for example, the Frank Zappa album Apostrophe would be found this way: music library/artists/Zappa, Frank/Apostrophe. When I look in Metadata Manager, the "Zappa, Frank" folder cannot be found. Nevertheless, my entire Frank Zappa collection can be found in Emby just listed as one giant album. So, I can't even edit the metadata through Metadata Manager.

Has anyone else experienced this problem and, if so, does anyone have any suggestions for how to address this issue?

Thank you in advance.

Single tracks within a folder make that folder the album no matter how many subfolders/albums are within that parent folder.  But looks like the next beta will address some issues users have with Music.

4.6.0.7 - Music scanning rewrite - Emby Server - Emby Community

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I have not experienced this issue. My library organization is similar to yours, however, I do not have a 'artists' subfolder per se. My library is simply Music/Artists/Albums. I utilize nfo files for the metadata which I found assists in troubleshooting problem albums.

Personally, I find the lack of standards for tagging audio files and how Emby is handling them frustrating. Very difficult to isolate the problem.

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2 hours ago, AVRider said:

I have not experienced this issue. My library organization is similar to yours, however, I do not have a 'artists' subfolder per se. My library is simply Music/Artists/Albums. I utilize nfo files for the metadata which I found assists in troubleshooting problem albums.

Personally, I find the lack of standards for tagging audio files and how Emby is handling them frustrating. Very difficult to isolate the problem.

Lack of standards? We support the tags written by popular applications such as Picard, Mp3Tag, and others.

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Agreed. I should have been clearer. My comment about tagging standards referred to tagging in general and the lack of standards, independent of Emby.

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JosephCameron

Thanks to everyone who replied. A few minutes after I posted, I had the insight that perhaps it was "loose" files not inside an album folder. This cleared up 95% of the problem. There is still one that I can't figure out. I have a box set of music by the German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. It's 40 discs and, for some reason, Emby is putting all of these discs into one album. There are no individual files outside album subfolders, so that isn't the problem. The other problem is a "Misc" folder I have that is individual songs by artists whom I don't care enough about to own an entire album. I could make individual folders for each of those songs, but that would be a hassle.

In any case, if there's a new version forthcoming that might fix metadata problems, I'll wait and see how that works.

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I have a number of albums that have "contributing" / track artists for a track, or for any number of the tracks in the album. I have seen where the tagging consists of the following:

1. Album Artist with Artist; or

2. Album Artist feat. Artist 

Emby will produce erroneous entries in the "Artist" view. For example, if every track in the album has either of the above, "with" or "feat." Emby will create an equal number of erroneous entries after the scan. When I open "Edit Metadata" for each of these entries I see two Musicbrainz IDs. One for the album artist and one for the track artist. These are considered bad entries and the Musicbrainz lookup fails.

How should Emby be processing these album tracks?

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2 minutes ago, AVRider said:

I have a number of albums that have "contributing" / track artists for a track, or for any number of the tracks in the album. I have seen where the tagging consists of the following:

1. Album Artist with Artist; or

2. Album Artist feat. Artist 

Emby will produce erroneous entries in the "Artist" view. For example, if every track in the album has either of the above, "with" or "feat." Emby will create an equal number of erroneous entries after the scan. When I open "Edit Metadata" for each of these entries I see two Musicbrainz IDs. One for the album artist and one for the track artist. These are considered bad entries and the Musicbrainz lookup fails.

How should Emby be processing these album tracks?

Why do you feel it's erroneous when it's coming from your tags?

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Yes, these entries are a direct result of tagging from recognized apps, i.e. MP3tag. The data is accurate although I cannot speak for their representation in the tags.

All I see as a user in the "Edit Metadata" window is that Emby transferred metadata including two Musicbrainz IDs representing the Album Artist and a track Artist. These IDs are an accurate representation. The "Edit Metadata" window only captures the Album Artist's name (text), not the track Artist's name (text). 

My question is this. Does Emby handle this case? That is, two Musicbrainz IDs, one for the Album Artist, and one for the track Artist, side-by-side? If so, how?

 

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Happy2Play

Do these extended tags show up in mp3tag?  right click track and select extended tag or highlight the album and press alt+T

But if you have plugins enabled and Emby does a lookup via your already tagged media it could pull contradicting information from provider verses your tags also.

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40 minutes ago, AVRider said:

Yes, these entries are a direct result of tagging from recognized apps, i.e. MP3tag. The data is accurate although I cannot speak for their representation in the tags.

All I see as a user in the "Edit Metadata" window is that Emby transferred metadata including two Musicbrainz IDs representing the Album Artist and a track Artist. These IDs are an accurate representation. The "Edit Metadata" window only captures the Album Artist's name (text), not the track Artist's name (text). 

My question is this. Does Emby handle this case? That is, two Musicbrainz IDs, one for the Album Artist, and one for the track Artist, side-by-side? If so, how?

 

Yes there are separate values for these two in the metadata editor.

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I have attached a screenshot of the MP3tag tags for the album. This extended tag window represents the 1st track. All other tracks are the same but with a different track artist.

Emby appears to be pulling the MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID tag listed. This tag includes the two IDs I previously mentioned with the first ID being the Album Artist.

This relates back to my first post where the Album Artist is accompanied by "with" or "feat."  In this case "feat." is used.

The Edit Metadata window under "Artists" only has one Musicbrainz ID field (see screenshot #2).

Santana Guitar Heaven Screenshot.png

Santana Guitar Heaven ARTIST Edit Metadata Screenshot.png

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Happy2Play

But it also comes back to the delimiter used to separate the Artists as a guess I would first say your issues is using commas vs semicolons.  So in your case that string is a single different person.

 

But changes are happening with this double musicbrainzids in the next beta also.  But proper delimiters are still required.

@Luke is it just semicolons and forward slashes?

Edited by Happy2Play
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These are un-doctored tags. I did not manipulate any part of the tags. I did not add or change delimiters. Any delimiters came from the MP3tag album sources. 

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17 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

 

@Luke is it just semicolons and forward slashes?

Yes, we don't split on commas because that can lead to incorrect splits.

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Happy2Play
4 minutes ago, AVRider said:

These are un-doctored tags. I did not manipulate any part of the tags. I did not add or change delimiters. Any delimiters came from the MP3tag album sources. 

To my knowledge MP3TAG does not tag these musicbrainzids, but I could be wrong but in my use case it has never provided these tags.  But since Emby will not split on commas you have to make these changes or remove the tags.

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I manually adjusted (within MP3tag) the MUSICBRAINZ_ARTISTID. If I remove the leading ID (Album Artist) Emby looks only at the second ID (Artist). The result is what you would expect. The metadata is adjusted and an entry is created for the artist.

However, some tracks have more than one artist and ID which basically produces the original issue. Seems to me that Emby would need to parse the multiple IDs that are transferred.

Will this be handled in a future release?

P.S. - I tried both Musicbrainz and Discogs for the album metadata. Regardless, multiple IDs are present for one or more track artists per track. This is not unique to this album.

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How is an artist who appears on more than one album represented on the Artists screen? This artist does not have an album of his own.

Also, how is an artist represented on the Artists screen who has his or her own albums(s) and appears on another album(s)?

I do like the changes that were incorporated in 4.5.3, i.e. Song level details, backdrop details.

 

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How is an artist who appears on more than one album represented on the Artists screen? This artist does not have an album of his own.

The artist is tagged on at least one song in the library.

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Songs are in fact tagged. The artist is appearing multiple times on the Artists screen equal to the number of albums he appears on. 

I would think that the artist appears once, and all the albums he or she performs on listed below?

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36 minutes ago, AVRider said:

Songs are in fact tagged. The artist is appearing multiple times on the Artists screen equal to the number of albums he appears on. 

I would think that the artist appears once, and all the albums he or she performs on listed below?

You could try removing your music library from emby, run a full scan to clean out the database, then add it back and see how that compares.

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Before removing the complete library I thought I would try only removing one of the albums from the library and then restore it. This solved the issue.

Onto the second case. An artist has one or more albums, and also appears on another album. 

In this case the above fix did not work. I removed the album the artist appears on from the library. I was left with only one entry for the artist and his two albums. Perfect.

When I restored the "appears on" album a second entry is created for the artist. The two are side by side on the Artists screen?

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  • 4 weeks later...
FlapZappa

I believe I have a  similar problem in that all my frank zappa albums (about 150ish) all show up under a single album and it is the only album that shows up in the music list. As far as I can see all my other albums appear to display correctly.

 

I have been through a large number of the zappa albums running them through picard and also trying the ez cd creator mentioned earlier and they still only show up under that single album. (fz1.jpg)

 

Initially it was 200 hundred motels that was the container album and I thought it might have been something to do with it being a number so I removed it and changed the name to Two hundred motels and that seemed to fix it, for that particular album (fz4.jpg). Not something I can really do for 150 or so albums

 

I created a separate Library for just zappa albums and under the folder view I can see the individual albums but the tracks only show in alphabetical order and playing a whole album is not possible. Other albums display and play properly. (fz2.jpg, fz3.jpg)

Most of my collection has been run through either MP3 tag or windows media player to get the album info and apart from zappa albums works fine on Emby. (ac.jpg)

Had it been any other artist it would probably not have been such a problem. As it is it is highly annoying.

If there are any other bits of info you require just ask

 

 

fz.jpg

fz2.jpg

fz3.jpg

fz4.jpg

ac.jpg

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