Delete current emby server and make a new one or just recreate 1 Library?

[r5yk5 11]

Tl,dr – 
1. After years of messing with my music files is it best to nuke my Emby server and start again or just delete the music library and create a new one?
2. Is it best to keep all the Neil Yong {& Crazy Horse, & The Shocking Pinks, & the Blue Notes, etc} in separate folders or I can I just put them in one big Neil Young folder?

I have an Emby sever and a roon server running on the same machine for a few years now. The idea was to use Roon for music and Emby for films with an Emby music library for backup. I've found that I actually use Emby to listen to Music 90% of the time. However my tagging left a lot to be desired and metadata is a feature of Roon and it’s fantastic. So I re-tagged my Music with beets and that made a right mess of things so after months & months (maybe years) of  trying to get some semblance of order manually I tried songkong which did a pretty good job.

Then I discovered that while you can’t retag your library with roon, you can export it with new tags, that match the roon database, so you end up with new files. I am in the process of doing this to 2TB of music. I have my music in rough genre folders that I created. Hard Rock, Instrumental Jazz, Pop, Prog, Punk etc etc. I am doing this folder by folder. You can only export to a roon client and the server is headless so I have to export the files over the network to my laptop then delete the originals from the server and copy them back.

I can’t work out what Emby is doing with this. Sometimes it immediately scans the new files an I can see them in the “Latest Music” Section. It did this for all but one of my Classical folders. Italian Soundtracks I had to rescan manually from the Emby folders menu. My Alternative Rock folder doesn’t appear to be doing anything even after selecting a manual scan. Every file has been retagged at least twice since I created the library and now every single file will be new. I’m thinking that the best thing to do would be to delete the library and start from scratch as the database is probably a right mess.

I don’t have many films, about 100 or so and they have pretty good nfo files. I have a big audio drama library again with good nfo files. A small photos library and some strm files for a  radio Library. Question 1 is would there be any advantage in starting again and creating a new Emby Server with a brand new database or would just creating a new Music library be sufficient?

Before I do this, I used to have one Stanley Clarke folder. Now I have Stanley Clarke, The Stanley Clarke Band, The Stanley Clarke Trio……. I don’t mind having separate album Artists in the tags but I would like to put all those albums in the Stanley Clarke folder. Which is the best approach. I think I use the discogs plugin in Emby to scrape the artist info, or maybe it’s the musicbrainz one. Either way which is best to do?

Thanks

[Luke 42078]

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so I have to export the files over the network to my laptop then delete the originals from the server and copy them back.

Hi, so the files will all be in the same places as before? My suggestion would be to just run a library scan in Emby after this is done.

[Luke 42078]

Quote

Sometimes it immediately scans the new files an I can see them in the “Latest Music” Section.

OK then maybe they're getting new file names/paths? This would suggest they are being removed and then re-added.

[r5yk5 11]

Yes, with new names and paths sometimes. I guess the question is whether the database will get really messy and it's better to start again or if Emby will sort it all out eventually.

[Luke 42078]

38 minutes ago, r5yk5 said:

Yes, with new names and paths sometimes. I guess the question is whether the database will get really messy and it's better to start again or if Emby will sort it all out eventually.

I think it should be fine, but if you're making major changes, and it's been a while since you started fresh, then sometimes there are benefits to doing that.

[r5yk5 11]

Ok I'll see what it looks like once I'm done.

Many thanks Luke