FR: Option to sort music into groups (e.g. Albums, Live, Single, etc.)

[MindBullet 93]

No. It's supposed to be a server-side and automatic categorization via musicbrainz, sorting music on Emby the same way as on musicbrainz (Albums, Compilations, Singles, etc.). No manual tagging or collectioning involved

[Brendon 128]

On 09/08/2025 at 05:01, Luke said:

This sounds like a Collection, no? Or a Tag? Those are two grouping functions that allow you to make any kind of grouping that you want.

No @Luke, it's more a type, very similar to how we currently see albums and then below that we see appears on, expanding that would see singles, live albums as separate lines as well.

Now for my mind i would expect this to require a naming convention, for example in my music library i use [LIVE] or [CDS] so i know singles from albums and studio albums from live albums, i use that format as Emby does not read inside those particular brackets so it doesn't get included in the title making everything messy, maybe something like that could be done?

Emby could read that name inside [--] and apply the album to that type and display accordingly?

If you look at TIDAL they do the exact thing we are discussing here as does Spotify (i believe, don't actually use it) and most others i imagine, it's a pretty common practice in music apps.

[MindBullet 93]

On 8/10/2025 at 2:22 AM, Brendon said:

it's a pretty common practice in music apps.

That's more than a +1 on this. 

If you look at artists who have more than like 3 albums and 2 singles - talking Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, any other famous artist for whatever reason - and who have like 20 albums, 8 compilations and 350 singles....well yeah, then browsing that artist and find a particular song/album/compilation/... is almost impossible on Emby, if you're browsing through artists, as you'd have to scroll through like a 4 billion items long horizontal list.

That's my point why I suggested that...2 years ago

Edited August 11, 2025 by MindBullet

[MindBullet 93]

Also, the idea of tagging all of this manually might be a solution for some (or many) other users, but the greater the music library, the less handy is a tag-based solution. I'm not gonna manually tag 9000 albums, so the implementation I am imagining is:

- Have a switch on any music library like: "Sort albums into groups" Yes/No
- If no: Behavior is the current one, no sorting
- If yes: Obtain release types for the existing media - which is already publically available on Musicbrainz - and sort the music library into those primary and even secondary release types.

That's it.

That's how every other music platform is doing it. That or at least similar. Emby is the only provider (that I know of) that just throws - worst case - 80 albums, 145 singles and 18 compilations into 1 big scrollable horizontal row. I really don't wanna sound rude, but that's beyond comfortable if you're looking for a specific album/song and/or you're just browsing through an artist view

[MindBullet 93]

Hey @Luke,

I'm not asking for an ETA or anything the likes, but is this something you could imagine doing at some point in the future?

[Luke 42256]

On 8/9/2025 at 8:22 PM, Brendon said:

No @Luke, it's more a type, very similar to how we currently see albums and then below that we see appears on, expanding that would see singles, live albums as separate lines as well.

That is exactly what a Collection is. And a Tag for that matter.

So that's one way to do it. The other would be to have a album type property attached to albums to then separate them based on that.

[user24 367]

5 hours ago, Luke said:

The other would be to have a album type property attached to albums to then separate them based on that.

I'm very keen on having an Album sub-category of Release Type (have posted ideas previously so won't repeat everything here). I think this "other" method suggested by Luke would be the best approach for implementing anything. "Albums" should stay as the combined top-level, otherwise the Songs, Albums, Appears On, etc. pages could become unwieldy (especially for casual users) with perhaps too much information to scroll through. There would also be inconsistent hierarchical navigation flow of the whole UI (if that makes any kinda weird sense???) Album Release Types such as "Studio", "Live" etc. should ideally be the next-level down and viewed on the Albums detail page for an Artist. Splitting the top-level Albums into further top-level categories does not make sense to me. I would prefer having the overview of all Artist Albums (and item count) and then a sub-level of Album Types. Group By could then be used to split into the Release Types or not, as required.

[MindBullet 93]

Idk this is what I think is kinda nice and much more tidy than it currently is on Emby



I'll just provide an illustration of the band "Metallica" on both of my servers.

Plex Some other server:



Tidy? Clean? Check

Current state of Emby in the video:
 

 
Tidy? Convenient? Negative

Also and very important: Plex lets you decide if you wanna split up your music into release types or not. This can be done with a simple switch in the server settings and a simple "refresh metadata" afterwards.

And another also: I think the "Songs" view is legit and has a good purpose, but only if you don't have bands that have more than a few releases. Not even speaking about Metallica, but about Bob Dylan or the fcking Beatles who have released hundreds of albums, compilations, singles, best ofs, live albums etc. over several decades. These are all displayed in a one-liner on Emby, which as well makes it terribly uncomfy if there's 100 items+.

You can't tell me that anybody ever found it convenient to go into the "Songs" tab of such an artist, looking for a specific song and find this convenient. That's just impossible. Impossible to find anything specifically like that (except for a global search) Edited November 1, 2025 by MindBullet

[ginjaninja 605]

I took a trip down memory lane and installed Plex after your post.

I read that Plex uses musicbrainz's release type.

Plex's Artist BIO and Album Description fetching is a joy to consume but no awareness of Musicbrainz multi value [album]artist tags and composer tags is a bit of a deal breaker.

Emby's song tab would be more useful if a text sub search could be added to these types of screen IMO.

 

[user24 367]

Well, thanks to some great help from @GrimReaper I've managed to use JavaScript to turn the Artist Albums pages into more of a Discography page, where you can Group and Sort Albums by either Release Type (from custom album tags) or Decade (from standard year tags). 

• Does this automatically fetch Release Types from MusicBrainz? - No
• Does this automatically import embedded metadata from RELEASETYPE tags? - No
• Does this automatically Group and Sort by Album Release Types from your Emby Album tags? - Yes
• Does this automatically Group and Sort by Decades from your Album years? - Yes

Here's a couple of screenshots:

While this only works with the Web Client, it does give a good feel for what a potential native Emby implementation could be. It takes a bit of Album tagging work to set up for your preferred Release Types page view, but the Decades page view doesn't need any set up at all!

For anyone wanting to experiment with it for themselves the detailed technical information is here:

While it's not the magic automatic solution, perhaps we just need ROONALBUMTAG importation from Emby (as a faster first step) to make something like this easy to use.

I'll be most interested to know if this is similar to what other people are wanting? Cheers!

[user24 367]

On 3/30/2026 at 11:33 PM, user24 said:

While this only works with the Web Client, it does give a good feel for what a potential native Emby implementation could be.

Well, after being nicely distracted on another extremely worthwhile Emby project for a week, I’ve now started using this ‘for real’ on my music library. For anyone interested, here’s a new example, but from the perspective of:

• useful information vs useless clutter.
• ease-of-use vs difficulty-of-use.
• the enormous potential of the “Group By” function, beyond Collections.

(All screenshots below are uncropped full-screen, for direct comparison.)

The most decluttered view of an Album Artist’s Album page would have all the text fields turned off. This gives a very ‘clean’ view, but there is no supplementary information at all, so you really have to ‘know’ your Album covers!!! A useful side-advantage is more Albums can be seen at once, without scrolling (e.g.):

Showing the Album Title is therefore usually needed, but when this is turned on, the Album Arist is also shown by default. There is no separate Album Artist field in the Settings to turn on/off. I think this fixed default may be somewhat redundant because the Album Artist is shown at the top of the page and the Album Artist is typically the same for all the Albums (unless there is more than one, for shared Albums):

(Yeah, I use emojis in my text strings – some will likely hate it - I have tried various options that put icons on the Cover Art, but I like the Cover Art with nothing overlaid. All examples shown are just as relevant without the emojis.)

I usually also want to know Year and Release Type (currently custom Album Tag) though. These can be turned on and shown. But then the information turns into clutter because the text blocks are almost the same size as the Cover Art... and the info is truncated (e.g.):

T

All the required info might now be 'at my fingertips', but it becomes visual overload. Where do I want to look??? (e.g.) Exactly how manty Studio Albums are there and when were they released...???... well, I can apply a Filter for this:

That’s a reasonably useful sparse information view, but now I immediately decide I want to see all the Albums for the 1980s, but without any extra text clutter at all. It can be done – that’s a 10-selection Year Filter though, plus a change of View Settings:

Now it’s very easy to see the years, but in removing the Album Artist sub-text, I have lost the titles again. And, if I now want to see the 1990s in full, that’s another 10-selection Year Filter! I won't bother for now... So let’s reset back to having all the info on display:

With the albums_groupby.js script I can select an uncluttered custom Release Type order very easily. “Studio Albums” can be quickly seen and it is trivial to scroll down to “Live Albums” and more...  The titles and years are there, but the redundant Album Artist text is gone (e.g.):

Changing from “Release Type” to “Decade” is very fast. There are no multi-selection Filters to set up. Scrolling through the Decades is also possible - they can be sorted ascending or descending as well:

When I first commented about this Release Type feature (2+ years ago) I initially thought it might only have limited usefulness, depending upon the number of Albums per Album Artist (e.g. If there are only a few Albums then there may not be much point in grouping them). But having used the customised grouping option for just a little while, I think it would be a “killer music feature” for Emby to implement. I think Emby would very likely come up with something better than what the competition already has...

Thanks for considering!

...(In the meantime, I don’t think there is any obvious downside to importing embedded RELEASETYPE tags into Emby Album Tags now, along with using albums_groupby.js for fast uncluttered organisation within Emby.)...