Music Albums not showing

[Raelone 19]

I have Emby monitor my iTunes library folder.  It picks up the songs, artists etc., but not as an album.  I understand it reads from the tag information, but it seems that instead of the Album tag, it is reading the sort Album tag because if I go in and set the sort album tag it is now showing in Emby.  By default though iTunes does not add the sort album tag when adding songs.

Any way we can get it to use the album tag itself?

This won't show as an album

This does now show up

[Luke 42083]

Hi, no it reads the album tag. Are they also tagged with an album Artist?

[Raelone 19]

Nope, all single artist.  Everything without a Sort Album does not show, they all have an album.  I have more than 2000 albums all the same problem - Album only does not show Album + Sort Album shows.  Once I add the Sort Album name to the tag they show up in Emby as an album.  Plex has no issues and I understand Plex also reads the idv tag.

Every entry in my iTunes has the Album tag set.  I also remove any contributing artists etc. so they only show for the primary artist.  I tested it on ~25 albums last night, and every one of them would not show the album until I set the sort album for that album.

[pwhodges 2012]

So, is the single artist specified in the "Album Artist" tag specifically, which is the one used by Emby as part of recognising Albums?

Paul

[Luke 42083]

47 minutes ago, Raelone said:

Nope, all single artist.  Everything without a Sort Album does not show, they all have an album.  I have more than 2000 albums all the same problem - Album only does not show Album + Sort Album shows.  Once I add the Sort Album name to the tag they show up in Emby as an album.  Plex has no issues and I understand Plex also reads the idv tag.

Every entry in my iTunes has the Album tag set.  I also remove any contributing artists etc. so they only show for the primary artist.  I tested it on ~25 albums last night, and every one of them would not show the album until I set the sort album for that album.

Plex also requires an album\artist\song folder structure whereas we support anything. I've tested what they do before, and they take the artist name from the artist folder, so it's not that your tags are correct, it's that they're getting the information from elsewhere. So what you describe as "no issues" is actually a big drawback for others with different organization. That's why the album artist tag is important.

Anyway, you can have the same thing in Emby. In your music library settings, set your folder structure to artist\album\track. Then, when the album artist tag is missing from the audio file, we'll get it from the artist folder (two levels above the track).

Generally speaking you want to have this set first, so you may want to remove the library, run a full scan of all libraries to clean out the database, and then add it back with the new option. 

[Raelone 19]

My directory structure already is set to artist\album\track is my directory structure iTunes default actually).  If you think it is a directory structure problem why without changing the directory does just setting the sort album make it appear in emby now?

Album artist is not an issue, all the songs appear in the artist when drilling down by artist.  It is that no albums for that artist shows until the Album Sort is set in the idv tag.  Album tag only does not make albums show.

 

[Luke 42083]

7 minutes ago, Raelone said:

My directory structure already is set to artist\album\track is my directory structure iTunes default actually).  If you think it is a directory structure problem why without changing the directory does just setting the sort album make it appear in emby now?

Album artist is not an issue, all the songs appear in the artist when drilling down by artist.  It is that no albums for that artist shows until the Album Sort is set in the idv tag.  Album tag only does not make albums show.

 

Your directory structure is not a problem because as I mentioned, Emby Server can work with any folder structure for music.

However your audio files appear to be missing the album artist tag, and when this is the case, we can assume this value from the artist folder name when you have that option set.

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Album artist is not an issue, all the songs appear in the artist when drilling down by artist. 

These are not connected. Two different things. All songs appear in the artist because you have the artist tag set. But to get an album created, you need the album artist value from one of the two places that I've gone over.

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Album tag only does not make albums show.

Correct!  Album tag by itself is not enough because lots of artists could have an album called Greatest Hits.

By the same token, there's a reason why artist and album artist are two different things. Think of a movie soundtrack where each track is tagged by the artist for that song, but the album artist is usually Various Artists.

[Raelone 19]

ID3 V2.4 was not to reason, but can't delete this.  Still looking to see what exactly is missing.

Edited September 11, 2023 by Raelone

[Raelone 19]

Ok looks like it was a combination of Album Artist (Band in id3 terms) not being set (Artist, LeadArtist, being set was not enough) and the id3 being V2.4.  Setting the first was not sufficient. I did have to bring the version back down to 2.3.  iTunes was setting the Album artist too when setting the album sort and setting the version to 2.3 which is why I thought it was the album sort causing it.

I'm not sure why you would not fallback to the first entry of the Artist if Album Artist is empty especially if there is only 1 entry in Artist.  Seems logical especially considering there are probably setup like I am of putting everything into iTunes and just mirroring the iTunes directory.  iTunes concentrates on Artist more than Album Artist.  Just my opinion.  I wrote a quick little app to do both of these things and mass update the 44,000+ files in my iTunes directory so after an hour I now see all the albums instead of just a few.

If just 1 song on an album had it's album artist set the whole album appears complete.

[Luke 42083]

HI, thanks for the feedback !

Quote

I'm not sure why you would not fallback to the first entry of the Artist if Album Artist is empty especially if there is only 1 entry in Artist.

When you have soundtracks this can cause big problems.