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 119]

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 42077]

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 313]

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.