music library question

[arasquinha 3]

i was wondering if emby premier has a enhanced music library scrapping feature like plex does. 

i have a music collection that spans a long time that i inherited. hence tags etc are not all correct

 

i want to be able to scan this into a music library with minimum work on my end. i noticed that plex says they have a premium feature that does some sort of music finger printing to identify your albums. 

 

i have not tried it and i am new to emby so ignore my ignorance. 

 

Does emby have a way to respect folder structure over tags in some cases?

 

my music is well organized by

artist - album 

or 

various artist - album - cd 1...

 

the problem i seem to be having is the collection albums with multiple cd's. i believe the tagging is off in some cases.

 

is there a tutorial on how to fix these things within emby. or is the best way to use an external tag fixer before scanning into emby?

 

once again i am looking for minimum work and am willing to pay for such a feature. 

[jasonmcroy 316]

Personally I use Musicbrainz Picard to do my music tagging. Emby still isn't perfect when doing a scan, but I do have some albums that are not your usual easily found/known type of music so no metadata scraper is going to find those easily.

 

I have used the Premium Plex music feature and all it does is use Gracenote for the metadata. I don't think Plex actually does anything to the files themselves. Most server software is shy of manipulating someones files and a lot of people don't want their server software messing with what is contained in the files themselves. Plex is also not perfect in pulling in all metadata for all files and they seem to sort some of my albums in weird ways. As an example, I have taken painstaking efforts to tag all of my music to get it exactly the way I want it. Yet, some of those "odd" music folders I have will get put into some "Unknown Artist" category by itself. That is just my experience.

 

If you want the best experience with music I would suggest you use an external tagger to do all the heavy lifting and get everything like you want it then let Emby scan the folder and you can manually fix anything that doesn't come out the way you want it to.

[arasquinha 3]

how much effort do you have to put into picard?

is it fairly automated? or is it safer to monitor each album?

 

i am more concerned with the final product. i.e all my albums showing up in emby or plex properly sorted and want to minimize my effort getting there. i am not sure if the plex premium does the better job than the plex free. Within emby is there any additional tools improve the process or is the best best an external tool that does the work for you?

 

on a side note are the emby nfo files compatible with kodi? Are there tools to generate nfo files for emby?

[pir8radio 1312]

how much effort do you have to put into picard?

is it fairly automated? or is it safer to monitor each album?

 

i am more concerned with the final product. i.e all my albums showing up in emby or plex properly sorted and want to minimize my effort getting there. i am not sure if the plex premium does the better job than the plex free. Within emby is there any additional tools improve the process or is the best best an external tool that does the work for you?

 

on a side note are the emby nfo files compatible with kodi? Are there tools to generate nfo files for emby?

 

I use Tag&Rename which is similar to picard.  Which uses musicbrainz to ID the songs...  I've taken songs with no real filename and no ID3 tags and it "listens" to the songs to figure out what they are (audio fingerprinting).   I have 143,000+ mp3's and very few that couldn't be ID'ed.  It adds embedded images and lyrics track numbers all of the goodies...  I have not tried picard yet but from what i read it is very similar. 

Edited October 8, 2017 by pir8radio

[jasonmcroy 316]

how much effort do you have to put into picard?

is it fairly automated? or is it safer to monitor each album?

 

i am more concerned with the final product. i.e all my albums showing up in emby or plex properly sorted and want to minimize my effort getting there. i am not sure if the plex premium does the better job than the plex free. Within emby is there any additional tools improve the process or is the best best an external tool that does the work for you?

 

on a side note are the emby nfo files compatible with kodi? Are there tools to generate nfo files for emby?

 

There is some effort involved. Maybe the software mentioned above could be less effort? Sounds like it could be. Personally I don't feel Plex premium is much benefit over Plex free. It may give you a bit more metadata than the free version. It depends on what you need and want.

 

Yes, Emby nfo files are compatible with Kodi. There is a setting for it under the "Settings" section on the Emby dashboard. I don't use it personally so I can't give you much information about it other than pointing out that it is there.

[arasquinha 3]

is there an external tool that i can run to manipulate and create nfo files for music? also download album art. this way emby can read the info it needs from the files?

 

i find the emby web interface to edit the metadata it needs per album kind off clunky.

[ryandavidg 30]

I'd just add to the good suggestions above that I suggest you don't bother with the Emby web interface to edit the metadata as you mentioned doing. I spent a lot of time on a couple of albums when I first set up my library before realising that it was way more productive to just get the tags sorted in the underlying files. I never went into stuff like embedded images and lyrics, for my purposes I was just using something like Foobar if I was doing a quick check on the numbering for multi-disc albums, or mp3tag for doing batches at a time. Then pasted extras like "folder" images into the directory and.. done. Emby picks everything up perfectly once you've got the underlying tagging right. When I first imported the collection the biggest issues I had were with inconsistent Album Artists (damn AC/DC, AC-DC and ACDC) and multi-disc labeling, as I prefer double albums to show up under the same album rather than having a different 'album' entry for disc 1, disc 2. But once you've got the hang of sorting this out it's really quick, just don't waste time fiddling in the web interface.

 

(If you're importing a big collection beware of a couple of quirks like if you have FLACs also containing ID3v2 as well as FLAC/Vorbis tags, can result in titles etc doubling up in Emby)

Edited October 12, 2017 by ryandavidg

[Luke 42085]

i find the emby web interface to edit the metadata it needs per album kind off clunky.

 

@@arasquinha why is that?

[pir8radio 1312]

it's a lot to mess with when trying to adjust tags for hundreds/thousands of songs..  Most tag editors are more like excel sheets with one mp3 per row.  Its pretty easy to mess with 10, 20, 100, 1000 mp3 tags at once.   Not so in emby.

[ryandavidg 30]

I remember initially going into every track on a double-disc, one by one, to adjust the disc numbers and a couple of other things, clicking save and exiting on each track. It took ages. Also battled to resolve inconsistent album artist names across various albums. After a couple of server upgrades these changes disappeared for some reason (from what I recall Emby doesn't change the underlying tags and overrides them in an NFO file/xml when editing, so perhaps something happened to this). Anyway, by then I had long since learned my lesson and spent about 20 seconds fixing the underlying tags in Foobar or mp3tag.

[arasquinha 3]

@@arasquinha why is that?

an example would be when i want to do identify and i enter some fields to search and when nothing comes up and i try to go back I dont get taken to the fields to try somethign else i have to go back in and click on identify and start over. in my opinion that is not how a search feature should work. it would be nice if its easily change the search parameters. 

 

i did try identify with a few albums last night and it worked great once i found the right album to match with. I ended up having to go to musicbrainz find the album and then use the id  in the search field. 

Which again is my issue with some albums not properly tagged. 

 

Another example would be some soft of bulk editor. Like i imported an album and the cd2 tracks were marked cd1.  i was playing with the metadata and i had to edit each track to correct it. 

again something that I could have fixed using picard or a tag editor. 

 

all my music is properly organized by artist - album - cd1..2.....

and various artist \ album \ cd 1..2...

 

i wish there was a way for emby to take a combination of folder structure and tags to make the decision. 

 

the biggest problems I am having are with my compilation cd's. again I am sure these are from tagging issues.  

 

I put the same set of albums through plex and emby and I felt like plex did a better job with subsetting the albums (more precisely the individual cd's in a multi cd album correctly. i like the way emby keeps it all under one album and then divides it into cd 1 and cd 2... whereas plex splits the cds into seperate albums. 

 

If emby meta data was stored in an editable file or even better a sql db. I could write queries to do bulk editing like I want. 

I am not sure how it decides which albums require a .nfo file. I only see them in some of the albums not all. again I could probably edit an nfo file to correct it faster than using the web interface.

 

Please dont take this as a rip on emby. i really like the overall feel for this project and community better than plex. I would rather put my money here than plex. I have been playing with both to see which one will make my life easier. 

 

my music collection is so old and a hodge podge of friends rips etc..we share as a way to backup our collections :-). 

I have been putting this off for many years because i know how bad the tagging is. i have just been using file explorer to browse to a folder and select and play to foobar in the mean time. 

[Luke 42085]

Thanks for the feedback !