FLAC files with same Album and AlbumArtist tags appear as a duplicate album if the Artist tags differ.

[Standroid 0]

Simple flat file organization - all (39K+) files are FLAC music, are complete performances and are uniformly tagged using mp3tag. My schema uses 15 "standard" FLAC tags and four more of my own creation. FLAC tags that are not used in my schema have been removed. ID3v1, ID3v2 & APE tags have all been removed. Searching for added tags in emby is disabled - I'm happy with my tagging.

Every file has an Album tag. Most files have one or more Artist tags using FLAC/mp3tag convention for multiple values. Most files have a Composer tag.

Every file has the identical value for the AlbumArtist tag: "Various Artists". The AlbumArtist tag is not relevant to my schema, but I added this tag to every file because it was the most frequently cited solution to the duplicate album problem. Adding this AlbumArtist tag has had no effect on the count of duplicate albums.

Problem: Files with same Album and AlbumArtist tags appear as a duplicate album if the Artist tags differ. I would like to see just one entry for each album in the Albums table.

I can understand the logic of grouping files with a unique combination of Album and AlbumArtist as a unique album, since album names are frequently recycled, but why extend that logic to every track with a different artist? Compilation albums are common, right?

What am I doing wrong? All suggestions are welcome. Thanks for reading.

Environment: Emby Version 4.9.3.0 running on a Synology NAS, DSM 7.1.1-42962 Update 9. Clients are Windows and Android.

Edited March 1 by Standroid
Added environment detail

[Abobader 3485]

Hello Standroid,

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Please wait for someone from staff support or our members to reply to you.

It's recommended to provide more info, as it explain in this thread:

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Emby Team

[user24 354]

3 hours ago, Standroid said:

Problem: Files with same Album and AlbumArtist tags appear as a duplicate album if the Artist tags differ. I would like to see just one entry for each album in the Albums table.

Hi, yeah this is a fairly common problem and it sounds like you have already read up on how to format your music for Emby, here:

https://emby.media/support/articles/Music-Naming.html

and know your way around Mp3tag, etc., etc...

Making "AlbumArtist" the same should ideally fix the problem, but if it doesn't, there may be other embedded tags causing problems??? - one immediate thing to check in Mp3tag (if you haven't already) is do you have any "Album Artist" tags - with a space? These are typically not shown in the LHS tag panel and you need to "View Extended Tags" to check. If these match your "Artist" they may override the "AlbumArtist" tag?  Sorry if I am telling you things you know already...

Beyond that, you may need to provide a specific example of a problem album to get this resolved, with the details of the embedded tags shown in Mp3tag and what you see in Emby. Do you have both "good" albums and "problem" albums? What is the difference between the two...

Any other details you can provide may be helpful? Cheers!

[Luke 42250]

It’s ok if the artist tag is different. It’s the album Artist and album values that need to be consistent for each track.

[Standroid 0]

Thanks All for reading and replying. It has given me hope that my schema "should" work and encouragement to dive deeper in search of a solution.

First, I believe that there are no "rogue" tags, e.g. "Album Artist" with a space. That confidence relies heavily on mp3tag's "Extended Tags" view as well as its striping of ID3 tags, so if there are known weaknesses there my confidence may be misplaced. Again, my library is exclusively FLAC audio files.

Here's what I have done to attempt to recreate the problem:

Starting with one of the many large albums that show the issue, (500 Years of Organ Music, Vol.2), I isolated five short tracks performed by three different artists. Currently, these five tracks are displayed in Emby>Music>Albums as members of three different albums, all displayed as "500 Years of Organ Music, Vol.2". I copied those five files with just the following edits to each file:
1. Album name was edited to "500 Years of Organ Music, Vol.0",
2. The text "TEST_" was prepended to the "OrigTitle" tag which generates...
3. A new "Title" with "TEST_" embedded and
4. Generates a unique filename so that these can coexist with the original files in my flat-file library.
5. The "AlbumArtist" tag remains "Various Artists", The "Artist", "Composer", etc tags remain unchanged from the originals.

Then, in Emby>Music>Folders and selecting the folder I did a "Scan Library Files". (drum roll...)

Presto, ONE (just one) new album by "Various Artists" with all five test files and each correctly tagged with their artist - all exactly as emby is supposed to do! So, I was unable to recreate the problem in isolation.

I have created two zip archives of the five files in original and edited forms if anyone would care to take a peak. Each archive is 34MB and I don't know if it's appropriate to post them here??

Thanks again for sticking with me. Apologies for the length of the posts, but my goal was to save you time asking questions.

[Standroid 0]

A little more perspective...

Mp3tag counts the number of unique albums in my library as 1,682. Emby puts the count at 2,321. There are many (most?) albums that are treated correctly. Not all of the problem albums are large - I just spotted a single-CD album with just five files (four from one artist and one file from that artist collaborating with one other) that emby splits into two albums.

[kikinjo 294]

I feel your pain. I have 4 different "Eric Claptons". Tagged whole music library with beets several times, nothing helped. Even retagged without musicbrains, same result.

[Luke 42250]

@user24 might be up for looking at them.

[user24 354]

Ok, sure - no promises that I can find the problem/solution though... two files each per 'good' and 'bad' albums should be enough to test. e.g. two 'good' songs that combine correctly into one album and two 'bad' songs that split incorrectly into separate albums...

[Standroid 0]

OK, here are three songs from the same album that show up in Music>Albums as two separate albums, both titled "Aaron Copland - Fanfare for the Common Man, Appalachian Spring etc". The song, "Ceremonial Fanfare", shows up in one album by itself and the other two songs show up in the other identically titled album (along with another six songs that all belong to the same album).

BTW, when all of these "problem" albums were originally scanned into Emby they had no "AlbumArtist" tags - "AlbumArtist" has never been a tag that I find any use for. I only added the uniform value of "Various Artists" for all "AlbumArtist" tags a week ago when I got serious about solving this problem. About the same time, I cleaned up all of the gazillion other tags that I discovered with mp3tag ExtendedTags view. Until then, the multiple appearances for so may albums could be explained. Is it possible that Emby has still remembers those old, garbage tags even after multiple Scan Library Files and Refresh Metadata cycles?

Thanks again

Copland, Aaron-Fanfare for the Common Man-Mehta, Zubin-175.flac Copland, Aaron-Quiet City-Marriner, Neville-528.flac Copland, Aaron-Ceremonial Fanfare-Philip Jones Brass Ensemble-225.flac

[user24 354]

OK, here’s some thoughts… (sorry for the rambling length)…hopefully will give you some ideas to try out…

9 hours ago, Standroid said:

BTW, when all of these "problem" albums were originally scanned into Emby they had no "AlbumArtist" tags - "AlbumArtist" has never been a tag that I find any use for. I only added the uniform value of "Various Artists" for all "AlbumArtist" tags a week ago when I got serious about solving this problem. About the same time, I cleaned up all of the gazillion other tags that I discovered with mp3tag ExtendedTags view. Until then, the multiple appearances for so may albums could be explained. Is it possible that Emby has still remembers those old, garbage tags even after multiple Scan Library Files and Refresh Metadata cycles?

A good point. Yes, it is somewhat possible. Note: Emby does not import all tags though. If you have modified your embedded metadata, usually Emby should pick up the changes upon a rescan of the library, or the relevant parent folder – but not always. Sometimes scanning the individual song files or the virtual album (more on this later) will work - but not always. (I think it has been a bit worse since 4.9.1.90 - but difficult, from the outside, to pinpoint why) A last resort is typically:

• Remove the problem album folder(s) from your music library
• Scan your music library (though I find the parent folder is usually sufficient)
• Now there should be no trace of the files in the Emby database and the relevant page views.
• Add the files back into your library (perhaps one Album at a time?)
• Rescan library (or parent folder)
• Now the modified album(s) should ideally appear correctly
• If the problems persist – recheck the embedded metadata in Mp3tag.

It may ultimately come down to this and you could take this approach OR if you are just starting on setting up your Emby music library to begin with, it may be quicker and easier to start again by deleting the current library and creating a new one??? 

9 hours ago, Standroid said:

OK, here are three songs from the same album that show up in Music>Albums as two separate albums, both titled "Aaron Copland - Fanfare for the Common Man, Appalachian Spring etc". The song, "Ceremonial Fanfare", shows up in one album by itself and the other two songs show up in the other identically titled album (along with another six songs that all belong to the same album).

I downloaded your test files…

Seeing that these are from a Classical music album, it now makes more sense that you don’t use AlbumArtist – though there may be better ways than using “Various Artists” that may be useful (more on this later).

From your DISCOGSURL tag I think this is the relevant album:

Upon firstly checking your embedded metadata tags in Mp3tag, all relevant fields/tags appeared to be correct with the same ALBUM and ALBUMARTIST across all the songs. Therefore (in theory) adding to Emby should create one album of three songs.

(Note: I’m currently using Emby Beta 4.10.0.4 on a Windows PC. While this is different than your setup, my assumption is that this won’t matter greatly for this testing purpose???)

When I added your test album/songs (unmodified) to my library, it imported as one album, as follows:

Therefore, you may need to look at the removing/rescanning steps above, for your set up??? Keep reading though...!

Beyond that, here are some more observations…

• You don’t have any embedded album art, so I assume you have folder.jpg (or similar) in your album folders? (as a test I added the embedded artwork in Mp3tag).
• The songs appear in alphabetical order rather than Disc and Track order because you have no embedded Track number tags and using (e.g.) a Disc number of “01-01” will not import the Disc number (as a test I added the Track numbers and used “1” and “2” as the Disc numbers, as per your tags and the Discogs album info).
• You have song years of 1976 and 1977 across the three songs. I assume these are the years of the individual performances (based on the Discogs data). Emby shows the album as “1976” probably based on the first song alphabetically? But the difference in  song years doesn’t seem to split the album? (as a test I changed this for all songs to the album year of 1996).
• I also added the Discogs album reference number directly into Emby.

Here is the result, upon rescanning the parent folder (rescaled to fit everything on screen):

I’m not suggesting you have to do any of this (unless you want to). Maybe the correct Track and Disc Numbers are useful? Maybe the song performance years are more important than the album year? (Note: you could keep the song years embedded and still change the album year in Emby – but this could be lost upon rescanning.)

For this Album you could potentially make the album Composer “Copland, Aaron” the Album Artist. Emby will see the Album Artist and the Composer as the same entity. There may be other useful Album Artist methods for Classical music – but not my area of expertise!!!

I see you have an embedded PLAYLIST tag of: Orch GB-IE-US for these songs. If you make a new Mp3tag field called ROONTRACKTAG and copy over your PLAYLIST tags (it can be done in bulk) then Emby will import these for you, into an Emby Tag, upon a rescan:

Lastly, while I’ve been doing all of this and then changing Album Artist to “Copland, Aaron” and back again to “Various Artists”, not paying too much attention – IT HAPPENED – rescanning the parent folder did not pick up this specific Album Artist change!!! I then tried rescanning from the virtual album and the change was picked up immediately. So yeah, there is possibly something strange going on, but rescanning from the album is easy to do… or may well have been my error??????

If anything above has not been explained clearly enough. let me know. 

There are more technical areas you could look at, such as FFPROBE and logs, but that would need Emby to assist, rather than me.

Anyway, I managed to listen to a long forgotten ELP album and learnt that Aaron Copland was the original composer of Fanfare for the Common Man. Cheers!

Edited March 4 by user24

[Standroid 0]

Thank you - lots to digest - lots to consider - amazing stuff! But, I stopped cold when I saw that my three files were digested into your emby library as a single album! So, acting on that here's what I have done...

1. I moved the first few hundred files out of my Orchestral folder into a folder I named "sandbox". The "sandbox" folder is named in the .embyignore file. Then I started a Scan Library Files of the Orchestral folder. In short order those removed albums were gone from the Music>Albums table. Then I moved the files back into the Orchestral folder and started another Scan Library Files of the Orchestral folder. In time, all of the previously duplicated Album names were reduced to one line per album! Now, to scale up this solution...

2. I added all four large folders that comprise my library to the .embyignore file and started a Scan Library Files! Sure enough, after much churning emby showed all my music gone - sweet. Then I commented-out those lines in the .embyignore file and started another Scan Library Files. That was eight hours ago - I normally only scan the library overnight. The scan just finished and everything looks sweet! I have more checking to do, but I'm optimistic that we have a solution.

My tentative diagnosis is that emby has a long memory for deleted metadata that used to belong to files in the library and emby remembers too much. Painful lesson.

Thanks again for all the help. I may have more questions for you as I consider more of your comments.

[Standroid 0]

Correction: I should have said, "... I'm optimistic that we have a solution an undocumented work-around".

I'm afraid I spent too many years in hardware and software development where I often lost sight of the difference between a solution and a work-around. I'm not going to "Mark" the previous post as a "Solution". I hope that someone from emby who understands the difference monitors this forum.

[user24 354]

On 3/5/2026 at 9:41 AM, Standroid said:

Thanks again for all the help. I may have more questions for you as I consider more of your comments.

No worries! At least you have the album problem resolved for the moment - with a "Fix" even if you don't see it as a "Solution".

Thinking a bit more about some of the other things I mentioned... have you played around with the Mp3tag Actions and scripting at all?

With your test files previously, I had just manually changed the Disc and Track numbers. BUT, if you did want to do this across your whole library, it could be automated in Mp3tag. E.g. just make an Action such as this:

Or whatever variation that may suit what you potentially would like to do???

(Note: I only tested this on your 3 test files - you would likely need something slightly different if you have numbers 100+)

This is just an example of something that would take ages to do manually, but very easy if automated. Cheers!