Added MP3/Music - but 50% of artists are incorrect?

[dayoff 0]

I was wondering if I am going about this the wrong way...I decided to take the plunge and add mp3s into Emby.   I have a folder in my config called 'mp3' and mp3 paths entered into emby as:

 

\\servername\mp3\collection\a

\\servername\mp3\collection\b

\\servername\mp3\collection\c

...etc

 

The actual share paths are clean..the music is all sorted into folders named after the artist, as:

\\servername\mp3\collection\a\abba

\\servername\mp3\collection\a\aerosmith

\\servername\mp3\collection\b\beatles

...etc

 

However, further down into the subfolders, things get murky... some artist folders only have a couple single tracks, others have every album, so I'll have a subfolder like:

 

\\servername\mp3\collection\b\beatles\abbey road\01-Firsttrackname.mp3

\\servername\mp3\collection\b\beatles\abbey road\02-Secondtrackname.mp3

\\servername\mp3\collection\b\beatles\revolver\01-Firsttrackname.mp3

 

** Issue 1:

When I go into Emby, click on Music, then select Artists, I see  pages of (01) (01) (01) (02), etc.  But in Metadata manager, I don't see (01) (02), etc.

 

** Issue 2

When I go into the A's, I see artlists listed like they should...but sometimes twice...like I'll see 'aerosmith' twice, even though they are only in one folder as shown above. 

 

** Issue 3:

When I go into the Metadata manager and open up the music folder,  I'll see mainly a list of artists, but then i'll see an album listed like 'Abbey Road'...and when I look at it, the path will be \\servername\mp3\collection\b\beatles, so then I adjust the 'Name' field to Beatles.  There are also a ton of 'Unknown'...but all of these Unknown names are in specific folders.

 

My goal was to get this stuff into Emby and work on cleaning it up a bit more as time went on, thinking I could get by with the high level paths being correct, but is the system trying to read into the tags and doing other things?  I know it won't be perfect right off the bat, but when parts that should be organized (the folder structure) isn't coming over right, then i'm sort of wondering if it's my config or the tracks or the folder layout....

 

Any info is appreciated

 

Thanks

Pete

[Luke 42078]

are the id3 tags populated in the songs?

[dayoff 0]

Usually...I say that because I'm looking at 16 years of ripping my CDs across Macs and PCs and different apps, had a few bouts of 'auto organizing' tools that went haywire, etc...  Thus, I've always relied on the file structure to get me narrowed down to the artist folder I want to listen to...  That folder contains the album subfolders and misc. tracks, but the filename and tag are probably the weak links...  Thus why I'm hoping I can avoid step one of the project being 'go through 80,000 MP3s and fix all their tags' if my folder structure is the pillar of organization at the moment...

 

Pete

[Raff 51]

Emby primarily uses the tags for metadata. In your case, I recommend grabbing Mp3Tag since you can grab and update all the songs in a directory and update the Artist pretty easily. Specifically, I have the context menu option, so you would just right-click your Aerosmith directory and it will automatically select all the music in the underlying folder structure. From there it is easy to update.

[Happy2Play 9780]

Have you looked at folder view for music?

 

User icon top right-Settings-Home Screen Settings-View Styles-uncheck music

Edited September 27, 2015 by Happy2Play

[dayoff 0]

I'll check that folder setting out... just curious, though... in the Emby Folder Structure wiki instructions, it shows a format just like mine.  Why specify such a structure, if the application relies on tags? 

[Happy2Play 9780]

The structure is correct.  But it is the enhance view interruption of your current tags creating the issue.

 

If enabled, views will be built with metadata to offer categories such as Suggestions, Latest, Genres, and more. If disabled, they'll be displayed with simple folders.

[dayoff 0]

If it's the view, what would trigger the metadata manager to be half Artists, and half album titles?

 

For example, I have:

 

Path

\\server\mp3\collection\b\beatles

Name:

The Definitive Collection

...and no artist info is downloaded.  But a couple entries later in my metadata manager I have:

 

Path

\\server\mp3\collection\d\depeche mode

Name:

Depeche Mode

...and it has an artist overview, artist website, etc...which looks correct.

 

The fact that it's downloading one as an artist folder and another as a album folder, even though the folder depth is the same, makes me think it's doing something else.  If I change that first entry from 'The Definitive Collection' to 'The Beatles', and click on Identify, it seems to want to identify an album of the Beatles, not 'The Beatles'...

Edited September 28, 2015 by dayoff

[Luke 42078]

I'll check that folder setting out... just curious, though... in the Emby Folder Structure wiki instructions, it shows a format just like mine.  Why specify such a structure, if the application relies on tags? 

 

traditionally users have wanted download album art to be stored in their album folder, and the same for artist artwork. in order to be able to associate folders to albums and artists, some structure is needed.

[Happy2Play 9780]

Are you seeing what is discussed here?

[dayoff 0]

Ok, I tried something and it fixed the problem.  The issue is the folder depth...

 

If I have two folders:

\\server\mp3\a\aerosmith

\\server\mp3\b\beatles

...and have my library pointing to multiple shares

\\server\mp3\a

\\server\mp3\b

 

I was assuming that it would follow the example in the wiki...and look at the next level down as 'artist', and the next folder deep as 'album'.

 

However, this isn't quite the only variable.  If the aerosmith folder has folders beneath it, everything works as expected.  However, if the beatles folder doesn't have folders beneath it, just a few non-album tracks in the folder, then Emby treats the 'Beatles' folder as an album instead of an 'artist', and does a discovery based on that.

 

I threw empty folders into the artist folders that didn't have full albums, and it treated things properly.  Ugh...can't wait to do this for a couple hundred artists...especially ones that may only have a single track...

 

Pete

[Luke 42078]

try media monkey's auto-organize feature to do this all in one shot.

[dayoff 0]

I'll script something to copy files from the root into a subfolder...just hate forcing addional folders into a tree structure to trick the app to do something differently... Now every front end app that looks only at folder structure has to navigate another tier to get to singles, but I hopefully it'll be worth it in the end.  I absolutely hate Plex's idea at the moment, having 'artist-album' folder tier, as literally not built to scale to thousands of artists/album combos in a single file directory... so it could be worse

[Luke 42078]

our intention is to become fully tag based and not care about your folder structure, and we're almost there but not quite exactly. so in the meantime, some structure is needed.