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Option to list items by filename rather than metadata


Chuck Tobias

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Chuck Tobias

Although I have videos sorted out pretty well so they're listed properly in Emby, I have a lot of music files created from analog records and tapes. These files contain no metadata and filenames are frequently just "track01.mp3, track02.mp3" etc. It really is not feasible to go through all of these mp3 files to add metadata and rename the files as song names. So as it stands now Emby is nearly useless for accessing my digitized music collection. It would be really handy to have a library option that basically says, "ignore metadata, just display the files and directories as they are laid out on the disk."

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Tagged meta data is critical for getting Music Libraries to work correctly.

I'd suggest making a copy of a few albums for testing purposes and downloading a program called MusicBrainz Picard https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

There are other programs similar to this one so try a few to see what you feel most comfortable with but you won't go wrong with that program and many of our users use it (myself included).

It can do a lot of the proper tagging needed but you need to be careful with mixed artist CDs or Classical CDs with most programs.  It will make quick work of your albums like Rush, Yes, Pink Floyd. AD/DC, Metallica, Van Halen, Pink, Taylor Swift, etc  that are single artist/band releases. But carefully look at collaborations to make sure any music tagging program gets it correct.

This will solve your problem of track naming, pulling down graphics, number tracks, writing the meta data to the files, etc.

But like I mentioned, experiment/test on copies of your music files to get a feel for how the program works or quirks on things I'd call collaboration discs.

Once you have the meta data written to your files, Emby should be able to use your files and build a nice music library for you.

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Chuck Tobias

Thanks, I'll check out MusicBrainz. However, I still think that the option to list files by name the way a simple MP3 player does would be a useful addition to Emby for this kind of situation. (Some of the mp3 files I have aren't even part of albums, they're from performances recorded off of TV and other sources, sometimes of obscure artists, and are going to be difficult to categorize to Emby's satisfaction.)

Edited by Chuck Tobias
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Chuck Tobias

What I've done for now is to run MiniDLNA in tandem with Emby (disabling Emby's DLNA function). Although the newest Roku Media Player has a number of bugs and problems, which is what prompted me to look at Emby in the first place, it plays music OK and in combination with MiniDLNA can list directories and files as they are on the disk. That will do until I can get the metadata issue sorted.

Though once again, I really do believe that the option to list the files in a library as they are would be a good option to include in a future version of Emby for people that already have media collections that Emby cannot automagically ID properly. It could potentially save a lot of extra work for the end user.

Edited by Chuck Tobias
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In that case maybe try setting up the music as a home video and picture library.

You should get pretty much the layout on disk this way.  Have you tried that?

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Chuck Tobias

Today I had some time so I went through and did some reorganization of the music files, as I did with videos to get them to list decently. Have not added metadata (didn't have that much time), but made sure that there was some logical organization to the way things were layed out and named. Rescanned the library and it looks pretty good now. Emby even picked up correct artwork in a lot of cases where none was provided with the material, and it looks pretty decent overall.

Prior to doing this a lot of files were just not listed, or at least buried somewhere in the listing that was not obvious. So that takes care of the music. However, I also have some miscellaneous type audio files. Some of these are multi-part spoken word audio organized into subdirectories, others just single audio files of various types. What's happening here is the subdirectories are not being listed and the individual files are listed all together as though all part of a single album.

Edited by Chuck Tobias
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Chuck Tobias

Now this is strange - today I went back into the problem area on Emby to give specific examples and now things are displaying pretty much as they should. Previously, when I wrote my last response, everything in that directory tree was being displayed as part of a single album. Today the items are displayed in their proper subdirectories, with a little manual cleanup required as far as names and pictures being displayed.

The only thing I've done between then and now was to stop emby-server to backup /var/lib/emby and restarted it.

 

Edited by Chuck Tobias
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  • 2 weeks later...
1 hour ago, EmbyProber said:

There is actually no reason Emby can't go by the file name for all media types and still pull all the correct information for the item as long as the item is named correctly without EVER using metadata.  

Yes you already can do that just by disabling internet metadata features.

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