Metadata Just Changed by Itself on 1000's of Audio Files

[jprobins007 24]

This evening, while I was actually, listening to an audio drama on Emby, the metadata on a very large proportion of my audio drama files simply changed themselves, reversing all my careful revision of the metadata by hand over the last year, despite the fact that metadata was locked on all the files in questions.  I am certainly looking at months of work to fix all the entries. I did upgrade my Samsung TV app to 1.7.3 earlier today, but the problem exists regardless of which device I use to access Emby. I am flabbergasted. The changed metadata seems to map what would happen if I refreshed metadata on these files without the metadata lock engaged. The metadata lock was, and remains, checked on the files in questions. I did not manually do a metadata refresh on any file during this time. Obviously, I would like to discover why this happened so that I can avoid it happening again if possible. But also I am wondering, perhaps in vain , whether there is any way to roll back these unwanted changes to the metadata of these files. I am attaching a number of log files spanning the period during which I noticed the issue. Any help would be appreciated.

I am running Emby 4.7.14.0 on a QNAP TVS-h674 running QuTSHero 5.1.4 2596.

Thank you,

Jim

embyserver.txt embyserver-63841375720.txt ffmpeg-transcode-4c2e54ce-ba5b-4628-ba43-c841cfcb783f_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-5c1c9c1b-0771-4780-9078-3d547c27385f_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-06cca063-174e-40fb-a9d4-fe82b6a50c6c_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-8b7f6f12-088e-4812-9164-66c7db7002b0_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-270bf77f-26f5-4272-a31c-70bca2f2f8b3_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-f306f4fe-c82f-409c-8f56-7914d77f6f4b_1.txt hardware_detection-63841362410.txt hardware_detection-63841375787.txt

[Luke 42077]

Hi there, can you please provide a specific example? 

Do you have the library option enabled to automatically refresh metadata every X number of days?

[jprobins007 24]

The library refresh option is set to never. I will post some screenshots to illustrate what has happened.

[jprobins007 24]

Screenshots 1, 2, 3 and 5 show an entry that was changed. Screenshots 6, 7, 8, and 9 show a screenshot that somehow retained into proper metadata as I had entered it.  For obvious reasons, I cannot provide a before ad after.

Screenshot 1.pdf Screenshot 2.pdf Screenshot 3.pdf Screenshot 5.pdf Screenshot 6.pdf Screenshot 7.pdf Screenshot 8.pdf Screenshot 9.pdf

[jprobins007 24]

In each folder, the View also changed from Primary (as I had set it) to List.

[Luke 42077]

Hi there, can you please attach the screenshots as images rather than pdf's? Thanks.

[jprobins007 24]

See attached.

[Luke 42077]

What fields changed for example?

[jprobins007 24]

Title, album, disc no., and track no.

Edited January 22, 2024 by jprobins007

[Luke 42077]

OK currently not all of those fields are lockable. I do see some metadata refreshes in your log files, which could cause them to be reset.

[jprobins007 24]

Is there a way to determine how or why those metadata refreshes happened so I can avoid them in the future, given that the lock metadata tickbox does not work.  I also note you stated that "some" of those field are no lockable.  Were actually lockable fields changed?

[Luke 42077]

Quote

Is there a way to determine how or why those metadata refreshes happened so I can avoid them in the future,

They came from the web interface, so you did them. We can add logging to the server log though to print out what item you did it on. That may help with this type of troubleshooting.

Quote

Were actually lockable fields changed?

Well I need you to tell me that but they shouldn't be.

[jprobins007 24]

Hmm. I may have refreshed metadata a few individual items that I just added to Emby.  Why did it affect so many other files in  different folders. I was only refreshing the individual entries.

Is there an effective was to lock the Title, Album, Disc no., and track no. fields so that I can prevent this happening again? It will be a mountain of work to correct all the changed entries.

[Luke 42077]

On 1/22/2024 at 3:57 PM, jprobins007 said:

Hmm. I may have refreshed metadata a few individual items that I just added to Emby.  Why did it affect so many other files in  different folders. I was only refreshing the individual entries.

Is there an effective was to lock the Title, Album, Disc no., and track no. fields so that I can prevent this happening again? It will be a mountain of work to correct all the changed entries.

Out of those, Title is currently the only one that can be locked, but we are gradually making more fields lockable over time.

You may want to consider updating the embedded metadata within the audio files instead, using something like Picard.

[jprobins007 24]

I will look into that. I do note that in this event the title fields changed despite being locked.

[Luke 42077]

2 minutes ago, jprobins007 said:

I will look into that. I do note that in this event the title fields changed despite being locked.

From a quick test i can't reproduce that, so that's probably been resolved for the upcoming 4.8 server release.

[jprobins007 24]

Just wanted to post a follow up: On Luke's suggestion, I investigated editing the embedded metadata using Picard. Picard was interesting but not useful for me as the Audio Plays and Audiobooks that are the main subject of this issue for me do not have entries in Musicbrainz. I subsequently, discovered MP3TAG (which I am sure many of you know). With a reasonably small learning curve, it has proved very useful in batch editing the embedded metadata on my files to avoid this sort of issue in the future.

[Luke 42077]

Thanks for following up.