Local ID3-Tags not working properly

[Karister 0]

Hi all,
 
I am looking for a proper NAS soft for my audio collection. While Emby has some cool features and I really love it's look&feel, I am unable to get some stuff working. I have RIPped CDs to flac files with filled ID3-Tags. I have created test library with 3 albums:

• Dire Straits & Mark Knopfler - The Best of Dire Straits & Mark Knopfler: Private Investigations
• Sting & The Police - The Very Best Of Sting & The Police
• Yes - The Best Of Yes - 1970-1987

When I go to albums section I can see all of them which is fine. But there are several issues:

• In artists/album artsists view Yes is missing. I found out that I can fix it by updating album tag from The Best Of Yes - 1970-1987 to The Best Of Yes: 1970-1987. Why is this dash so important? [ ] also don't work.
• In Artists view I can see Sting and The Police from album 2. Dire Straits are visible too while Mark Knopfler is missing. Displaying artists in album view is also inconsistent. More in screenshots later. In general dual artists albums lead to display problems. I have tried splitting them with & and ;. Nothing works consistently. I was renaming album artist tag, folder name and both.
• Genres are completely missing
• Docs say that Emby has higher prority for local tags but they do not work without data from online services. When I uncheck all metadata sources in library settings, nothing works, I see no artists.

Here are screenshots with descriptions to show my problems: https://imgur.com/a/hX5l1AH. Please advise.

 

Thanks.

Edited January 14, 2020 by Karister

[Luke 42089]

Hi, is your music tagged with artists and genres? Did you customize any settings on your music library?

[Karister 0]

As mentioned in my post: I have tags filled and I have provided screenshot with them. I created test library with default settings.

[Happy2Play 9785]

Not knowing how that tagging software works, Emby uses ffprope to read the embedded metadata.  So we would need to see the output of what it reads off your tracks.

[Karister 0]

Files were tagged by dbpoweramp when ripping. I used soft from screenshot to read only. I can manually edit those tags even with Windows 10 by right click on file, going to properties and the ID-Tag tag. When I change artist and album artist tags to Sting all works fine. But when I update Album Artist to Sting & The Police or Sting; The Police and update Artist to either Sting or The Police (depending on song) all goes wrong. If you need some details like logs, let me know what to look for.

[Karister 0]

I have one more finding:

 

I gave up with embedded file tags and I used metadata editor of Emby. I edited song Artist to Queen and saved. I see Queen. I edited Artist to dhjhjdsgfj and I see it. I edited Artist to Sting, saved (confirmation popup showed up) and Arist field is empty. I edited Artist to Sting; The Police and it was saved as The Police. For some reason it removes Sting. Dunno, you don't like him? Creating new library does not help. There are some artists that are not saved in Artist files for me. Same problem with Yes and 4 Non Blondes bands. Is there some way to clean all caches, files, etc and perform clean install?

[Luke 42089]

@@Karister can you provide a sample track for testing?

[Karister 0]

Hi again and thanks for coming back to it.

 

As much time have passed, let me add some update: I have performed a full clean reinstall of Emby and created my lib from scratch so that it uses only local metadata (I unchecked all checkboxes, including those under advanced options). It works perfectly fine. I am highly satisfied with it and I am going to buy premium when I finish building my audio collection and get some Linux-based mini-PC.

 

However, when I enable checkboxes regarding MusicBrainz, etc, and refresh metadata, my lib gets broken again. What I have noticed is that when I have albums by Sting and albums by Sting; The Police, problems begin. In album artist view I see two Stings and each of them has different MusicBrainz Album Artist Id in Emby metadata. When this happens, some Artists disappear completely as well.

 

All in all, I am happy with results, as I wanted Emby to use local tags only. But I believe something works wrong when connection to external music services is enabled. I will send you in priv link to my two flac files from albums that caused problems. However, this problem occur in very non-deterministic way. Before figuring it out, I have reinstalled Emby and rebuilt my lib about dozen times. Sometimes it happened after adding five albums and sometimes after adding twenty. I am unable to give clear list of steps to reproduce. In general, after adding all my albums by Sting, albums by The Police and albums by Sting; The Police, it stopped working with duplicated and missing album artists. It never happens when I don't check any AudioDB, etc services connection, though.

Edited January 30, 2020 by Karister

[Luke 42089]

Strange. I tested these files and got the expected result of Sting.