Music Tagging

[thelanranger 11]

I'm totally at a loss as to how to get consistent music tagging.

I have a ton of music and I'm trying to get everything to show up in emby how it should be no matter what I do SOMETHING is always screwed up.

How do you add music that DOES NOT HAVE musicbrainz IDs?! I have removed this entire plugin and it still searches for these tags and even if I open the files in Jaikoz and strip out all the tags then files will still be shown inconsistently.

Why do these show as separate albums? Why can't I see any of these tags in the metadata manager? What is it even reading? If I put some garbage tag in the MB Release ID hole then I have high certainty that it will work fine because I've fixed other albums with that but why if all those files are in the same folder, with the same album name as the folder does it put them into 10 individual folders and ignore 2 of the songs?

[Luke 42078]

Hi, the folder doesn't matter. They need to have the same album name, same albumartist, and mbz IDs are used, they need to be consistent for each track.

[Luke 42078]

And if you edit the embedded metadata of a track, make sure to run a library scan after that 

[thelanranger 11]

I did that all. The screenshots are showing how the data is displayed in jaikoz and emby and then how it is not displayed properly. How do I resolve this?

[thelanranger 11]

Also, if it doesn't matter what folders they're in why do you ask that question?

[thelanranger 11]

I'm basically have the issue described here. It's not so much 'art' as it is dealing with things that simply do now have musicbrainz data.

If I have an album saved with proper Artist, Album Name, track name, track number, and Album Artist tags, and embeded art but there does not exist MB IDs for one of those tags it should not prevent emby from putting it into an Artist folder, an Album folder, or an Album artist folder.

It seems insane to me that you're making the "Album Name", "Artist", and "Album Artist" folders by musicbrains ID and not by their actual name! If I put 500 albums in there with 10 tracks each that all have the same album name you'd make a separate "Album Name" folder, 5,000 times and put one track into each folder?! But why.....

[Happy2Play 9780]

Musicbrainz in not needed at all, just embedded tags.  But in the end 99% of the time Folder structure is not used (4.7+) but will with for example wav files that ffprobe can not read added id3 tags.

 

1 hour ago, thelanranger said:

If I put 500 albums in there with 10 tracks each that all have the same album name you'd make a separate "Album Name" folder, 5,000 times and put one track into each folder?! But why.....

Emby needs more then one embedded tag to create a album.  

Quote

For these types of compilation albums if you want all tracks to show up as a single entity you want to make sure both the "album" and "album artist" fields are the same for all tracks. Otherwise the album will be split up for the various artists listed.

 

[Carlo 4561]

Hi, could you zip up that album and PM it to me?
I'll set it up on my test server and see how it imports/scans in on my system.

[thelanranger 11]

This is a good example but I have a bunch of stuff that does the same as this.

The naming is all correct and it doesn't have a MB id available so I blanked those tags out. When emby scans it it makes every single song its own album folder with blank artwork. It's killing me, softly.

2Big.rar

[thelanranger 11]

This is not what it does.

If you have a VA album and the 'Album Artist' has 'Various Artists' and then it's tagged with the 'MB Release Artist ID' of '89ad4ac3-39f7-470e-963a-56509c546377' then it knows it's part of a compilation disc. The reason it's making extra junk is because if the 'Artist' and 'Album' tags have some kind of MB tags that match another normal album then it outsmarts itself. The MB tags override the name tags (there should be an option to just turn these completely off) and if they're blank then it doesn't bother to process the 'Album' tag as a database folder name and attempt to put everything with the same album tag into the same group.

Every single file is sorted by its own unique file ID or something because sometimes a single file out of an album will just be randomly not in the DB and other times it will just be randomly in its own folder (maybe because the artist is 'feat. someone). The sorting priority is totally whacked out and there's no way to correct it within emby. It doesn't make sense to me that it wouldn't work like the movies and TV at MINIMUM. Why couldn't I just pick a file and ID it with the album name, artist name, song title, and art that I wanted and hit 'lock'? It should pull most of this from the files, but when it screws up I should at least be able to see what it's reading...this isn't even available in the metadata manager!

[Luke 42078]

@thelanranger I've merged your posts into here. Please keep the discussion in one place rather than multiple places. Thanks.

[Luke 42078]

13 minutes ago, thelanranger said:

This is a good example but I have a bunch of stuff that does the same as this.

The naming is all correct and it doesn't have a MB id available so I blanked those tags out. When emby scans it it makes every single song its own album folder with blank artwork. It's killing me, softly.

2Big.rar 49.97 MB · 2 downloads

Easy answer - the songs are all tagged with different musicbrainz album ids (and different release group ids).

Please note - these tags are not required, but if they are present they will be used and therefore need to be correct. So you have two options - fix them so that all values are the same for every track, or just remove them altogether.

[Happy2Play 9780]

Yes as Luke mentioned.  Even thought I did not see these differenced in mp3tag, they are visible via ffprobe which is what Emby uses to read metadata.  So I am guessing there are multiple embedded tags versions.

This causes track 1 and 2 to be different albums along with different release groups also.

Edited October 27, 2021 by Happy2Play

[Happy2Play 9780]

Stripping all Musicbrainz id merged the album.  But making them the same will do the same.

[Luke 42078]

And you probably going to ask, why don't we just ignore these tags - these tags make it possible to have mulitple releases of the album in your library without them all getting merged together. Some artists will sometimes have multiple albums of the same name.

[Happy2Play 9780]

I am guessing there are different tag versions going on here as the this image is not seeing everything ffprobe sees.

Edited October 27, 2021 by Happy2Play

[thelanranger 11]

I just looked at these in Jaikoz and the tags you were describing are labeled as "MB Original Release ID" and stripping them out did nothing.

I also can't even see that tag at ALL in mp3tag so I'm not really sure why you're reading that instead of the MB Release ID?

[Happy2Play 9780]

50 minutes ago, thelanranger said:

I just looked at these in Jaikoz and the tags you were describing are labeled as "MB Original Release ID" and stripping them out did nothing.

I also can't even see that tag at ALL in mp3tag so I'm not really sure why you're reading that instead of the MB Release ID?

All I can say is Emby uses ffprobe to read embedded tags.  So you can not reliably depend on what any other program sees or write.

But when there are conflicts like this I alway nuke all tags and retag.  I have already shown it is possible with your media.

Here are your files with stripped MBZids, what do you get?  But yes my example mis-identified the album on MBZ query.

 

2Big.zip

Will remove files in a day or so.

Edited October 27, 2021 by Happy2Play

[Luke 42078]

48 minutes ago, thelanranger said:

I just looked at these in Jaikoz and the tags you were describing are labeled as "MB Original Release ID" and stripping them out did nothing.

I also can't even see that tag at ALL in mp3tag so I'm not really sure why you're reading that instead of the MB Release ID?

Why do you think it did nothing? What exactly did you do?

[thelanranger 11]

I removed the other tag that shows up in Jaikoz and it didn't change the display in emby. Neither mp3tag nor Jaikoz is showing the tag that is referenced in Happy2Play's post. The only way I can see it in Jaikoz is to dig into the preferences and specifically add a column (this is a paid program btw). 

Once I did that and removed the tag on those file and rescanned then they still showed up the same. I'll download his stripped out copy and replace it to test, but it seems like you're reading unconventional tags?

And also, this brings us back to the whole "why can I just turn all this off?" thing and "why can't I see any of this information in the metadata manager?" thing. 

[Luke 42078]

Quote

why can I just turn all this off

I guess this just hasn't come up before so it hasn't been done yet. Remember these are your files, so we're only reading the information inside them. Usually people want this read, not ignored.

I would probably suggest using tag writing software that writes to all id3 versions. Most likely it's only updating one but not all, and that's why the information is still hanging around in there. I would try using Picard or mp3tag.

[thelanranger 11]

I was using mp3tag but it doesn't change ANY of those tags at all. I ended up buying Jaikoz because it let me change more and it Autocorrected things and would let me see more data. That's why it is so frustrating. Every time I think I have it figured out as to what tags are being read by emby and go through and start changing things to meet that standard then something new pops up. 

I probably have 3TB of music. It's thousands and thousands of songs. I need to know EXACTLY what is being read and EXACTLY how it is reading it so I don't have to rename all this stuff more than once. These are files that come from various places and have worked perfectly fine on countless other applications. Now I'm just trying to make them conform to your standards and you're just being vague or cryptic about it tbh. 

Can you provide an exact list of the tag names that you read in what order and which take precedence? Is there any way to see how these are being read by the application? Is there any documentation about any of this or some kind of standard that you're complying with? How do you resolve conflicts? What if data is missing? etc etc.

[Luke 42078]

Regarding the musicbrainz tags we read from tracks, they are as follows:

MusicBrainz Album Id:

MusicBrainz Album Id
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID

MusicBrainz Release Group Id:

MusicBrainz Release Group Id
MUSICBRAINZ_RELEASEGROUPID

MusicBrainz Album Artist Id:

MusicBrainz Album Artist Id
MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMARTISTID

For these three fields, these are listed in order of priority. So for example, for the mbz album id, we first check the tag "MusicBrainz Album Id", and if that is not present, then we look for MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID.

Does this help?

[thelanranger 11]

Why are you using the releasegroupid? 90% of the mp3s I have have complete garbage in that slot like "ripped by jeff" or something. 

Is this EVERY tag? I need a complete list of 100% of the tags that are scanned. Is there somewhere that this can be looked up? Artist, album names, track numbers, album artists, etc etc etc. I need to know exactly how tags need to be written to the file and what needs to be removed (and what doesn't matter) in order to update everything that I have to be consistent please.

[Luke 42078]

1 minute ago, thelanranger said:

Why are you using the releasegroupid? 90% of the mp3s I have have complete garbage in that slot like "ripped by jeff" or something. 

Is this EVERY tag? I need a complete list of 100% of the tags that are scanned. Is there somewhere that this can be looked up? Artist, album names, track numbers, album artists, etc etc etc. I need to know exactly how tags need to be written to the file and what needs to be removed (and what doesn't matter) in order to update everything that I have to be consistent please.

A good starting point would be all of the tags written by the Picard software.

But yes, stripping out any garbage values you may have will likely help.