Question about musicbrainz tagging

[TulsaTV 4]

I have a 4-CD compilation album, Soul Spectacular! The Greatest Soul Hits Of All Time.

When I initially ripped it, Emby found it as two separate albums, the first with the first three CDs the second with the fourth CD.

I was able to fix this in Emby by adding the MusicBrainz Release Group ID into that field in each "album". It immediately merged them into the whole 4-CD album.

For some reason, it recently reverted to the separate albums again. I tried the same trick and it didn't work this time. I tried variations of the Album Artist ID and the Album ID, but no good.

I have fixed every metadata field, and even forced both "albums" to have the same cover art by using the Identify feature.

What could the problem be? What could be indicating to Emby that this should be two albums?

[Luke 42083]

@TulsaTV

Quote

I tried the same trick and it didn't work this time.

What exactly did you do? What exactly happened?

[TulsaTV 4]

Using the MusicBrainz Picard software, I found that the Release Artist Id, the Release Id, and the Release Group Id had the same values for all 90 tracks of the 4-CD album.

I copied the Release Group ID and pasted it into the corresponding MusicBrainz fields in the Emby metadata for each of the two separate "albums". This was sufficient for Emby to immediately merge them.

That trick worked the first time I tried it, but failed when I tried it the second time the album de-merged.

Edited June 14, 2023 by TulsaTV
Typo, clarification

[TulsaTV 4]

Is MusicBrainz the primary source of music metadata for Emby? Are there other sources it uses?

[pwhodges 2012]

The primary source is the metadata in the files themselves.  The Album Artist and Album Title must match exactly for the tracks to be considered part of the same album.

Paul

Edited June 14, 2023 by pwhodges

[TulsaTV 4]

12 minutes ago, pwhodges said:

The primary source is the metadata in the files themselves.

Thanks for that. I have used mp3tag to make sure the metadata is correct in all fields for every disc. That isn't always enough, depending on whether there are variations of the album out there (as Discogs can show).

But in this case, it really is a 4-disc album, and I find no source that claims otherwise. Plex saw it as one album from the git-go. Therefore, there must be some other factor(s) in play with Emby. But what?

Edited June 14, 2023 by TulsaTV
Typo

[TulsaTV 4]

20 minutes ago, pwhodges said:

The Album Artist and Album Title must match exactly for the tracks to be considered part of the same album.

Bingo! You got me wondering if maybe there was an extra space in one of those fields, and sure enough, the Album Title had a superfluous space at the end on the Disc 4 trackss. Fixed those and re-scanned, voila, one album now!