Bug report - two different artist.nfo being created when adding to music library

[steve1977 67]

This is picking things up from a related thread. After a few hours of trouble-shooting, I finally found out what is causing my issue.

 

When adding music albums to the Emby music library, Emby does create two artist.nfo files (one in the artist folder and one under MBS/imagesbyname). There is nothing wrong about this as two are actually required for artists / albumartists.

 

The issue is that both are created inconsistently in some cases and thus causing various issues with the web ui and more severely with DLNA.

 

Let me share two examples about the issue with you and hope for a fix:

 

Artist.nfo (in album folder)

<title>_Weird Al_ Yankovic & Wendy Carlos</title>

<title>George Michael and Queen with Lisa Stans</title>

 

Artist.nfo (in MBS/imagesbyname)

<title>"Weird Al" Yankovic & Wendy Carlos</title>

<title>George Michael and Queen with Lisa Stansfield</title>

 

So, there appears to be an issue with special characters (" . &) and also with long artist names (note Stans vs Stansfield), but this is only an issue for one of the two artist.nfo.

[steve1977 67]

Also one related issue. When I am making changes in the web ui (manually or via the refresh function), only the artist.nfo in the album folder is getting updated, the artist.nfo in the /imagesbyname folder stays unchanged.

 

So, there are two bugs here, which I hope can we addressed in one of the upcoming releases. Thanks!!!

[Luke 42080]

the only bug is the first. they are two separate artist records so only the one you're changing should be getting changed. so then the question is why are there two. that's what we need to look at. generally this will happen when the artist name within the embedded tag doesn't match the artist folder name. 

[steve1977 67]

Thanks for getting back.

 

Actually, the web-ui only allows to access and change one of the two artist.nfos, so I think it should change both.

 

Structurally, I think it does require that there two. One is in the album folder, which is required for Kodi, DLNA, and others. But album folder only exists for albumartists, so it still requires the second one for the artist view / selection.

 

I believe the very first issue to solve is why the artist.nfo in the album folder does not properly display all special characters and cuts down the artist name if it is too long. I think you are right that this is somehow related to the album folder name?

 

Anything else I can help trouble-shoot. You can see by many posts that this is drawing my attention as I would really love to get DLNA working for all albumartists.

[steve1977 67]

Ah, now I understand what the real issue is.

 

The albumartist is based on the folder view (not on the tags in the files). Only after clicking on n artist, it gets you to the info based on the tags. So, if the tags are different from the artist folder name, it doesn't work? That's a dillemma and I am not even sure there is an issue solution?

[steve1977 67]

The easiest "quick fix" may be to have Emby parse the first albumartist from a file in the artist folder and treat this as the albumartist for spelling purposes. This should solve the consistency issue and may be an easy fix to implement? What do you think?

 

An alternative would not at all to use the folder structure, but instead build the albumartist view based on albumartist in tags, but I assume this would be a lot more difficult to do?

[steve1977 67]

Now I understand what you mean by "the question is why are there two. that's what we need to look at.". The answer is that the artist.nfo is created based on the artist folder name. The second artist.nfo is created based on the tags. Given they don't match, it creates 2 as Emby does not "know" that these are the same thing.