Music Library Import - Emby changing Metadata & Wrong Artist/Album Artist (I've tried everything!)

[Spaceboy 2493]

21 minutes ago, PenkethBoy said:

What will this actually mean - as Artist is usually a string of text rather than a formatted list of artists which is what Artists is used for along with the mbz_ArtistID

e.g.

"Amy Winehouse & Tony Bennett" is not an artist

Are we making a change for one user with "poor" metadata that will affect everybody???

Very much agree with this. I worked hard on my metadata to make it work well with the new requirements, it would be very disappointing if functionality is lost due to one person that hasn’t met these standards

[DarrenClimie-Newman 6]

I certainly wouldn't class my ID3v2 tags as 'poor', when clearly Plex, MediaMonkey and VLC player respects the main ID3v2 tags that most media players will reference.

The 'main' tags in my collection are 100% accurate based on the Discogs Database, as 98% of my music is from vinyl, so doesn't come with any embedded tags to start with.

Not everyone wants to use Musicbrainz as a database for metadata, as many people want to have things like release year to be the year it was initially released, not when it was released 10 or 15 years later on a compilation album.

All metadata tagging applications that I have used over the years focus on the main fields of Artist, Album Artist, Title and Album. 

Emby has been brilliant for me since switching from Plex, if it can just respect the tags that the user wants to use for their own personal collection, then it probably won't be be beaten.

I'm currently removing ALL non essential tags from my collection, and I can see where DJ EZ has also been DJ Ez, Ez, Dj EZ, so hopefully this will be the last fix!

[PenkethBoy 2063]

Sorry but if your tags were 100% accurate then you would not be having problems - you dont have to use MBz but you do need accurate tags even in 4.5

When you get 4.6 stable things are going to be even more picky and it will flush out other issues.

 

[DarrenClimie-Newman 6]

Plex and now also Jellyfin doesn't have this problem with my library tags.

You have no idea whether my 'Main' ID3 tags are accurate or not, I'm telling you they are, because I spent months doing it.

That is the type of response I would expect from someone over at Plex, not here at Emby!

The mere fact that all other media players RESPECT the main ID3 tags that most media players will reference, is why this is a problem in Emby. I'm not suggesting that it's not reference genuine legit tags, it's about it not respecting the tags that pretty much every other player will reference, and how most people will tag their music.

[PenkethBoy 2063]

Because they are different programs and coded differently - so have theior own ways of doing things

things are not how emby wants them - hence why your tags are not as accurate as they could be - even if you have spent months updating them

i'm giving you solutions or options and with a bit of work you issues will go away - even Luke chipped in with what to do and why you were having problems

My response you dont like is giving you ways of doing things that will work with Emby - take offense if you like but it does not change anything - you have data issues to resolve - do that and your music will be in a much better shape

 

[Luke 37071]

5 hours ago, PenkethBoy said:

What will this actually mean - as Artist is usually a string of text rather than a formatted list of artists which is what Artists is used for along with the mbz_ArtistID

e.g.

"Amy Winehouse & Tony Bennett" is not an artist

Are we making a change for one user with "poor" metadata that will affect everybody???

Well yea I think more comparison to other software is needed before making any change. My concern is about us being isolated by ourselves on an island where we're displaying one thing and pretty much every other music app is displaying something different. So I think I should probably run his files through lots of popular music software and see for that track how many of them display just EZ and how many of them display DJ EZ.

[Luke 37071]

4 hours ago, DarrenClimie-Newman said:

Plex and now also Jellyfin doesn't have this problem with my library tags.

You have no idea whether my 'Main' ID3 tags are accurate or not, I'm telling you they are, because I spent months doing it.

That is the type of response I would expect from someone over at Plex, not here at Emby!

The mere fact that all other media players RESPECT the main ID3 tags that most media players will reference, is why this is a problem in Emby. I'm not suggesting that it's not reference genuine legit tags, it's about it not respecting the tags that pretty much every other player will reference, and how most people will tag their music.

At the end of the day, whether a change is made or not, we are pulling data from your own files, so it's not as if these values are being made up.

[Luke 37071]

8 hours ago, Luke said:

 

Then you get an EZ artist because that's what ffprobe found in the artists (plural) tag, so I can promise you, the data is in the audio file somewhere. Although we should probably check Artist first and prefer that field as that's what most other software appears to be doing.

By the way, it's the "For you" track that has the Artists value of EZ.

[Luke 37071]

So far:

• Windows explorer - displays Artist
• Vlc - displays Artist
• Windows media player - displays Artist
• Picard - displays Artist, but has Artists available for editing in the tag editor

Some of the main apps I'd like to try this file with are Spotify, Apple Music and Media Monkey.

[Luke 37071]

One compromising idea might be to prefer the Artists tag, but only when there are actually multiple artists. When there's just a single artist, use the Artist tag. This would get us closer to what most other apps display, while still supporting the Artists tag for the situation in which it is needed.

@ginjaninja

@Vicpa

[PenkethBoy 2063]

yes that sounds more reasonable

another view would be if there are mbz_artistID tags they should be used first

then artists ( and maybe a comparison of Mbz_Id's with Artists values  )

then Artist 

[Spaceboy 2493]

11 minutes ago, Luke said:

One compromising idea might be to prefer the Artists tag, but only when there are actually multiple artists. When there's just a single artist, use the Artist tag. This would get us closer to what most other apps display, while still supporting the Artists tag for the situation in which it is needed.

that sounds good to me

[DarrenClimie-Newman 6]

Right OK. So, yesterday I completely removed ALL Extended / Advanced ID3 Tags across all of my files. Leaving intact Album, Album Artist, Artist, Genre, Title and Year ONLY. I confirmed that in both MP3TAG and also TagScanner.

I re-imported my library, and (I'll be honest), to my surprise i still have the issue with Emby changing the metadata, and removing metadata. Here are 2 examples:

Song: Ez Intro 5
TagScanner Shows:

Emby Shows:

Here is another example using Artist Todd Edwards.

TagScanner Shows:

Emby Shows:

There are no MusicBrainz IDs or AudioDB references, as i have both plugins uninstalled:

I also removed all cached data in the Programdata folder before re-importing. 

To prove that my Tags are good, I then imported the SAME library in Emby 4.6 for just those to artists, DJ EZ and Todd Edwards. 4.6 Showed just the 2 Artists correctly:

And the same 2 songs above are correctly imported with no change to its metadata:


 

If you want to check the Tags in these particular files, i have attached them in links below:

EZ Intro 5 - https://1drv.ms/u/s!AuCIJjnqE5JKlxym1L4G5YGG_YPr?e=72zyJ4
Echo of the Past - https://1drv.ms/u/s!AuCIJjnqE5JKlx3lx0leUc_L2LBZ?e=LI3Kza

I cannot understand why 4.5.4 and 4.6 with the same library data, imports differently, so i would like to know your thoughts to try and resolve this?

Thanks

[Luke 37071]

Emby isn't making it up. Run it through ffprobe and i promise you'll find the data embedded into the file.

[Luke 37071]

Additionally, try checking it with Picard.

[DarrenClimie-Newman 6]

2 minutes ago, Luke said:

Emby isn't making it up. Run it through ffprobe and i promise you'll find the data embedded into the file.

How do I run them through ffprobe??

[Luke 37071]

ffprobe -i "path_to_file" -show_streams -show_format -print_format json

 

[Happy2Play 8282]

4.5 has a structure variable and 4.6 does not.  Logs would help also.  But yes since Emby uses ffprobe, you should be verifying this that over other tagger software.

You should see examples in your server log.

 

[DarrenClimie-Newman 6]

1 minute ago, Luke said:

ffprobe -i "path_to_file" -show_streams -show_format -print_format json

 

Sorry I'm not an expert with stuff like that, can you give me a couple directions on running this. Giving me the text to use doesn't help me, if I don't know where I'm starting!

[Luke 37071]

25 minutes ago, DarrenClimie-Newman said:

Right OK. So, yesterday I completely removed ALL Extended / Advanced ID3 Tags across all of my files. Leaving intact Album, Album Artist, Artist, Genre, Title and Year ONLY. I confirmed that in both MP3TAG and also TagScanner.

I re-imported my library, and (I'll be honest), to my surprise i still have the issue with Emby changing the metadata, and removing metadata. Here are 2 examples:

Song: Ez Intro 5
TagScanner Shows:

Emby Shows:

Here is another example using Artist Todd Edwards.

TagScanner Shows:

Emby Shows:

There are no MusicBrainz IDs or AudioDB references, as i have both plugins uninstalled:

I also removed all cached data in the Programdata folder before re-importing. 

To prove that my Tags are good, I then imported the SAME library in Emby 4.6 for just those to artists, DJ EZ and Todd Edwards. 4.6 Showed just the 2 Artists correctly:

And the same 2 songs above are correctly imported with no change to its metadata:



I cannot understand why 4.5.4 and 4.6 with the same library data, imports differently, so i would like to know your thoughts to try and resolve this?

 

Just to comment on this, 4.6 also has updated ffmpeg/ffprobe builds, so that could always be a factor. Given the major changes in 4.6, I think you may just have to live with it for now in 4.5 and consider it resolved in 4.6.

[Happy2Play 8282]

3 minutes ago, DarrenClimie-Newman said:

Sorry I'm not an expert with stuff like that, can you give me a couple directions on running this. Giving me the text to use doesn't help me, if I don't know where I'm starting!

Example from first page

 

 

[Luke 37071]

By the way I tested your first file and it looks fine, so there could be an issue in 4.5.

[DarrenClimie-Newman 6]

4 minutes ago, Luke said:

By the way I tested your first file and it looks fine, so there could be an issue in 4.5.

Well that's good to know!

I can't seem to get to the directiy for ffprobe in command prompt, as my user name has spaces and an & symbol, and its expecting after the & symbol to be an internal or external command!

If you've just out the file through ffprobe, then you can tell me if it's got Embedded tags I'm not finding?! Sound like you've done that?

Im happy that 4.6 looks to be good. Any ideas on how long 4.6 is going to be?

[Luke 37071]

No, the file looks good to me, although generally speaking when uploading to onedrive i would zip it up to make sure they are not re-encoding it. But what i downloaded looked clean to me. If it had junk it would have shown up in 4.6.

[Happy2Play 8282]

No issues adding those test files either in 4.5.4.0.

As for the command line you need quotes around path.

ffprobe -i "C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Completed\UK Garage\DJ EZ - Ez Intro 5.mp3" -show_streams -show_format -print_format json

So you need to either cd to the folder containing ffprobe or type out path to ffprobe.

C:\Users\Media\AppData\Roaming\Emby-Server\system>ffprobe -i "C:\Users\Media\Desktop\Videos\Music - emby metadata\Completed\UK Garage\DJ EZ - Ez Intro 5.mp3" -show_streams -show_format -print_format json