Better playability of multi-disc music releases

[nospotify 184]

Emby currently offers no convenient way to play a single disc from within a multi-disc release. For example, it is impossible to select just Disc 2 from the 10 disc set below, either to play only Disc 2 and stop, or to add only Disc 2 to the Play Queue. It would be much more user friendly if each header text "Disc [n]" were right-clickable like any single disc is, and referred just to the tracks in that disc (i.e. until the next "Disc [n+1]" or the end, whichever comes first). Hard to implement?

[Luke 42077]

Quote

It would be much more user friendly if each header text "Disc [n]" were right-clickable like any single disc is, and referred just to the tracks in that disc (i.e. until the next "Disc [n+1]" or the end, whichever comes first). Hard to implement?

Hi, yea, but even if we did that we'd probably still have it queue up everything that comes afterward.

[Luke 42077]

What about multiselect and play?

[nospotify 184]

Yes, multiselect is possible, but many albums have a lot of tracks - just asking for a simpler, easier, more intuitive way of handling multiple discs in a set, as we could if we had a box set of CDs and could just pull out one.

[nospotify 184]

Bump. Any progress on this? As posted elsewhere (sorry - searched but didn't find this six-month old thread):

Has there been any further thought from Emby devs about making it possible to play/queue an individual disc from a multi-disc music album?

Again, the UI suggestion would be to have the "Disc (n)" header be right/long-clickable, just like any other album, with the standard right-click/long-click menu popping-up. (This would require adding "Disc 1" to the first disc of multi-disc albums.) But that's just one UI idea. The main point remains that Emby currently has no easy, intuitive way to play or otherwise act on on a single disc from multi-disc albums, which would be very helpful functionality.

[Luke 42077]

Hi, I don't have an update ,but yes, some of the ideas here are certainly possible for future updates. Thanks.

[doxxmulder 2]

Bumping this thread again. I really only have a handful of multi-disc albums, but I've spent the better part of a day manually editing tags and separating things into disc folders, only for Emby to still treat each disc as one whole compilation. I would really like to see some feature that lets me split this compilation into individual listings, or at least a workaround...

[user24 313]

@doxxmulder Hi, if you are looking for a "workaround" then it is possible to separate a multi-disc album into individual 'albums' by changing the Album Title to incorporate the Disc Number, e.g. Title [Disc 1], Title [Disc 2], etc. This gives the following result (real example):

An advantage is you have the individual discs separated for easy selection and individual playback, but the disadvantage is they are now separate albums that take up a lot of space in any of the list views. It also affects your overall item (album) count.  If you implement this, you can still keep the individual disc numbers in the Discnumber field, as they were originally. If you want to do this, I'd also suggest making the changes to your embedded metadata with a tagging program (e.g. Mp3tag) rather than just within Emby, because any Library Rescan will potentially revert to the original embedded metadata and you will lose your changes.

If you only have a "handful" of albums to change, it shouldn't take long to do this. I'm actually going the other way now and combining the single discs back into one parent album. (But I have 1000s!) However, there are still other disadvantages...

For better multi-disc music management there are at least three considerations:

• Group Album vs Individual Disc artwork
• Group Album vs Individual Disc titles
• Group Album vs individual Disc playback

Without these 3 areas being improved together, then I think there are always going to be pros and cons for Group Album versus Individual Disc implementation. There's an interesting discussion here about disc titles that I really should contribute to:

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/67584-disc-labels-for-music-and-audiobooks/

There's also other topics scattered about elsewhere, but I haven't seen anything yet that offers a good solution for all three considerations combined. Hopefully the Emby brains trust will get to it one day...

[doxxmulder 2]

@user24Thanks for the tip, unfortunately it didn't seem to make a difference for me. I tried changing the metadata to add a number after the album title, but it appears Emby still lumps it in with the other discs. I'm not really concerned about messing with stats, I'm just frustrated by not being able to separate out the two remastered albums on this compilation (which don't have any other release outside this box set) without changing the MusicBrainz data to point to a different release of the album. Extremely minor, nitpicky stuff, but it bothers me nonetheless.

Maybe getting rid of the MB IDs in the metadata would work..? I tried deleting them and renaming the album to the disc sub-title earlier, to no avail. But I didn't try with numbering.

 

[user24 313]

Yes, sometimes the MusicBrainz IDs can override any customization in Emby you are trying to do. It may be worth experimenting a bit more???  I've discovered that in the past with other things and have had to delete the MusicBrainz info.  I also understand the "nitpicky" stuff and spend way too long on it myself!!! I'll be interested to know how you get on...

P.S. Another idea... Perhaps you could make copies of the two remastered albums as totally separate albums (with or without MusicBrainz IDs). That way you could keep them in the boxset and have them individually as separate albums well - with the appropriate individual titles, artwork.

Edited June 8, 2025 by user24
added P.S. section

[doxxmulder 2]

I have spent much of this weekend trying deleting various metadata and cheesing it the best I could, I think I've reached the point where I should just give up editing metadata and hope Emby lets me separate them eventually. I could probably delete nearly all the metadata, but I think that would probably affect last.fm scrobbling, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: For anyone reading this in the future, deleting just about all the extra metadata worked, but only after moving the folders out of Emby and back in. I only left in the most basic data a typical CD player would show: title, artist, album, track number, length, date, and genre.

Edited June 8, 2025 by doxxmulder

[Luke 42077]

yea they could still get grouped based on the musicbrainz values.

[nospotify 184]

As noted above and elsewhere, for multiple reasons it would be fine if a multi disc album were considered as a single album in Emby, except for the playability-of-a-single-disc problem. This long-standing frustration - which can't be that hard to address? - is one of the reasons it's not evident that improving Music library functionality is a priority for the Emby devs.

[Luke 42077]

Hi, yes this is certainly something that can be looked at . Thanks.