Music Library Tags - Still an issue

[Guest]

Hi

I just returned to Emby & am retrying a premiere pass. I was aware at my last shot several months ago with Emby that music libraries were at that point newly tag driven. My libraries are now, as was then, organised cleanly into folders, tagged with Media Monkey 4 and, despite tagging all compilations with 'Various Artists' as 'album artist' as advised, these changes are just not showing up in Emby. I'm rebooting the server, rescanning, the works - still chaos. Last time round I gave up on Emby because trying to troubleshoot every variable (isolating out inconsistencies in disk number, artist name spelling, genre spellings, album title with all caps and things consistent - you name it), I was still getting an absolute dumpster fire unusable mess of a library. I even stripped out all my tags and started from absolute scratch (including rebuilding libraries, trying different libraries if I had more than one version - as I do - of several albums). so far, I'm having the same issues now. And now it's not just compilations - it's artists, everything. 

My first question - I've read a few times about the Music Brainz tool. Do all my albums need to 100% comply with how they are in Music Brainz (some aren't even in it) in order for them to display as intended in my library? In other words, do I *have* to use MB in order to use Emby, and no other tagging and organising software (I've used both Media Monkey & dB Poweramp Perfect Tunes) - am I wasting my time using anything other than MB?

Is it worth stripping all my tags anew and starting from scratch? Is it at all possible that some traces of my old Emby server installation are contaminating things (I'm noticing other artist and album unrelated photos as backdrops etc) - should I try another clean uninstall then reinstall? 

Just to clarify - other media libraries - TV shows, movies etc - are absolutely fine. It's just music.

Happy to demonstrate, but in all honesty it's exactly the same issue - and looks the same - as many others have posted with albums scattered every which way. 

Otherwise - should I attach a log - and if so, how do I do this? Thanks. 

 

Edited April 7, 2022 by jlambie

[Happy2Play 9784]

No you do not need musicbrainz.  But in the end you will need to go over specific examples.

As for stripping tags and starting from scatch, it is impossible to say.  Since Emby uses ffprobe to read the embedded metadata you would need to see what it sees.

[Guest]

10 hours ago, Happy2Play said:

No you do not need musicbrainz.  But in the end you will need to go over specific examples.

As for stripping tags and starting from scatch, it is impossible to say.  Since Emby uses ffprobe to read the embedded metadata you would need to see what it sees.

Thanks for this @Happy2Play. That’s good to know that Music Brainz is not essential. I think in the first instance I should try to see if I can get ffprobe somehow in situ to see what it sees, as you say. Then hopefully things may be clearer. 

[Vicpa 611]

Hi

Specific examples from your library will help. also the format of the tracks mp3,flac, etc

Attached is my take on the way emby maps music tags, which may help. It shows how MB maps tags from other formats and the X in the emby column are the ones emby captures. 

Emby _MusicBrainz_Picard_Tag_Map-xls.xls

MB isn't required,  I would compare the tag names that the tool you use generates. 

-viapa

[Tremas 200]

Hi @jlambie. Long time MediaMonkey 4 and Emby user here. I have also dealt with the difficulties of Various Artists in Emby, and I must say that for my needs, it is certainly easier to manage now that it is tag driven. Here are a few things I had to learn the hard way to understand how it works.

First, understand that MediaMonkey 4 supports both id3v1 and id3v2 tags. If you aren't careful how you set up MediaMonkey,  you may have songs where the MediaMonkey database shows you the correct value, but there is a difference in the id3v1 vs. v2 tags that are written to the file. Id3v1 tags really old now and are limited in character counts and genres, so in my case it was easier to just remove all v1 tags. I can't think of any players that still need them for backwards compatibility and they can screw up an import.

MediaMonkey has some help here: https://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/WebHelp:Clean_Your_Tags/4.0

The other thing that is easy to miss is that MediaMonkey does not easily show you all tags in the file. That is where software like MP3tag or Picard helps (or ffprobe if you like). Both have a default view that lists all tags (even the non-standard ones) so you can identify errors quickly. Speaking of Picard, it is important to know how it works. Even if you don't use it, if you haven't ripped all of your tracks yourself, someone else may have used it to tag the files at some point. Vicpa's map can help here too.

The most important thing to know is that Picard will add a MusicBrainz ID tags for artists albums etc. If you try to set the AlbumArtist tag to "Various Artists" but there is still a "MusicBrainz Artist ID" tag pointing to an AlbumArtist in their database, it can screw things up.

 

 

[Guest]

Thanks everyone for your helpful advice - essentially I have tags filled with all kinds of issues. I twigged that importing new files via Media Monkey 4 gave me nice clean tags so for the worst offenders I have just started with re ripping the CDs! 
 

@Tremas (great to see another Whovian by the way - I note this alter ego is preferred over, say, Gilles Estram, or - shudder - even Khalid! ) this is great advice. For some real head-scratching ones I will try to put them through Picard. I stripped the ID3v1 tags and it helped somewhat, so thanks for that. 

[Tremas 200]

Hi @jlambie, glad you are making progress! Yes, Keeper of Traken happened to be on when I was creating my profile. A.A. was the Master I grew up with and will always be my guy.

Also great to see another MediaMonkey user. It's still my favorite solution for building playlists and mass-editing metadata. I've been running MM v4 and v5 in parallel lately, and haven't seen much out of v5 that has really impressed me. If they had a good Mobile AP it would probably be my daily driver. However, since I've been getting deep into emby, MusicBrainz has now become part of my music tagging workflow. When the MusicBrainz database has complete data it works great allowing you to get details on each track's production and contributing artists, and multiple release dates for different album re-issues. You mentioned that you had several versions of some albums, and MusicBrainz handles that better than anything else I've seen. They even have a pretty good library of info on the Big Finish audios (back to Doctor Who), though there is plenty of debate on how to handle radio shows and audiobooks in their forums.

Anyhow, thanks for the kind words good luck getting your library in order.