Music Metadata Mysteries

[jmangan 11]

I still consider myself new to this incredible product so I hope these aren't stupid questions but I've got all of my movie and TV DVDs (SD) ripped and sorted and now I'm trying to get CDs done.

 

I'm finding the information sources far less reliable and complete than for the TV/Movies and it's giving me quite a few problems. I've attached a file with some examples below. These are pretty trivial but a bit jarring and, I suspect, being able to fix these would give me a better understanding of how the system hangs together.

 

For instance I've got a 'Beyond the Fringe' collection that is populated with gibberish on the album main screen. I went through every track and corrected the names, artists, album artists and disc number but it still shows the rubbish in the attached shot.

 

Similarly, I have some of my daughter's compilation CDs that show various random interpretations of 'Various Artists' even though I've been through every track and set the Album Artists to 'Various Artists'.

 

Finally, some artists appear as ALL CAPS and I can't seem to change that. I've tried editing directly, I've tried renaming the folders in /var/lib/emby-server/metadata/artists and then I tried editing the xml files within but it seems to make no difference.

 

I saw on another thread that deleting the 'library' file and letting Emby re-start its catalogue might help but that just allowed me to re-edit all of the changes I had already made once. I don't want to do it again!

 

What am I missing?

Metadata Examples.rtf

[ryandavidg 30]

I'm sure more experienced users will respond, but as someone who's recently set up a very large collection of music I thought I'd mention a couple of things that made my life easier:

- After editing some of the metadata directly in Emby, I found it was much easier to use Foobar on the underlying files. Highlight files in the folder - right click "play in Foobar" - once in Foobar right-click on the whole selection and choose properties. There I change album artists (and disc numbers for double/triple cds as these are also sometimes inconsistent which causes display variations) and generally make the data consistent. Once you're happy with the data there choose apply/ok. Once all the metadata is adjusted then rescan the library, assuming you haven't "locked" the metadata in any of the albums in Emby.

- I had no issues with FLAC tags but a couple of mp3s had gibberish titles (etc) in Emby even though the info seemed fine in the files. I checked the tags in Foobar (right click on selection - tagging - MP3 tag types) and they had both ID3v1 and ID3v2 checked. Removing the check for ID3v2 and then going to properties to review the data again, then rescanning as above fixed the problem.

Again, the devs will probably have better answers but this worked for me and my collection is nicely sorted now.

[jmangan 11]

ryandavidg, thanks for that. That sounds like a good way to tidy up the data on Windows and I will bear it in mind. However I am running on CentOS7 (I put this in here because of the 'General' sub-heading).

 

I could create an SMB share and run this from Windows (and I might do as my collection grows) but I would still like to know why the data I have tidied up doesn't seem to be reflected in the output.

 

Foobar sounds really useful though.

 

Cheers.

[ryandavidg 30]

I'm sure there are other players/editors one could use on your system, I just mentioned it as the specific way I tidied mine up. I found it much easier in the long run to just get the data right in the underlying files and then refresh Emby. When I started, I dumped a large collection of music in and the first thing I saw was two AC/DC CDs which weren't labeled as such (ACDC and AC-DC) and then fiddled in Emby eventually ending up with (I think) the right display names but the underlying data wasn't matching properly, so the artist backgrounds weren't consistent. Eventually just removed them and fixed them quickly in the underlying files. The same with some double cds without consistent disc numbers which were a hassle to fix in Emby but very quick in Foobar. Now when I spot a minor inconsistency I just fix it in the underlying files and it updates when I next refresh Emby.

 

Anyway, good luck with your collection, I'm sure the devs will have better advice on your issue.

[jmangan 11]

ryandavidg, I am a convert!

 

I followed your advice and OM$DEITY what a mess those tags were! I now understand why Emby had problems making sense of some of them but I'm still confused as to why my edits in Emby weren't reflected back into the files.

 

Whatever! From now on it's mass editing of tags for me rather than the painful one-at-a-time I've been doing.

 

Many, many Thanks.

[Happy2Play 9785]

ryandavidg, I am a convert!

 

I followed your advice and OM$DEITY what a mess those tags were! I now understand why Emby had problems making sense of some of them but I'm still confused as to why my edits in Emby weren't reflected back into the files.

 

Whatever! From now on it's mass editing of tags for me rather than the painful one-at-a-time I've been doing.

 

Many, many Thanks.

Emby only writes metadata to a nfo metadata file, not the media file.

[Luke 42086]

Yes that is correct.

[jmangan 11]

And that's the second part of the mystery solved.

 

Thanks all.

[Luke 42086]

hi @@jmangan, Emby pulls this information from embedded tags within the music tiles. If you edit those tags then Emby will recognize the changes on the next library scan.

 

Please let us know if this helps. Thanks !