Music albums from the same artist & name

[EduardoSantos 40]

Emby's new 4.6 version joins multiple discs from the same album on a multidisc album. This is great but...

John Coltrane has two albuns named "Coltrane". One was released on 1957 the other on 1962.

They are separate albums.

They don't have disc numbers on their tags, they are not on "Disc x" folders.

But Emby joined them. How can I make Emby treat them as separate albums?

My humble suggestion: Emby should only join discs for a multidisc album if they are from the same year.

(Coltrane is just an example: my music library has now dozens of incorrect joined albums)

Edited May 23, 2021 by EduardoSantos

[Carlo 4561]

If you look in Emby are these two albums using the same tags?  This is a meta-data view of an album

If these are the same I would then check how each album is tagged to make sure they have different IDs so Emby knows what albums they actually are.

[EduardoSantos 40]

They both have no MusicBrainz or TheAudioDB metadata on their .nfo files.

They have just embedded tags on the track files. 

And it seems Emby is ignoring existing .nfo files. Not only for these but for all albums joined.

[Carlo 4561]

Emby is reading from TAGS in the media in 4.6 so that is where you need to check/correct this info.

[EduardoSantos 40]

13 minutes ago, cayars said:

Emby is reading from TAGS in the media in 4.6 so that is where you need to check/correct this info.

And, just as stated on this thread's opening message, tags info indicate not only different years for each album but also that no one is disc 2 or anything that woud indicate that the discs are from the same album apart from having the same album name and being from the same album artist.

What info should be corrected??

[Deathsquirrel 745]

6 minutes ago, EduardoSantos said:

And, just as stated on this thread's opening message, tags info indicate not only different years for each album but also that no one is disc 2 or anything that woud indicate that the discs are from the same album apart from having the same album name and being from the same album artist.

What info should be corrected??

Run them through musicbrainz picard.  That will add the MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID tag to the tracks which will correct this issue.

[EduardoSantos 40]

7 minutes ago, Deathsquirrel said:

Run them through musicbrainz picard.  That will add the MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID tag to the tracks which will correct this issue.

I do not want to add MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID to my files. May I?

I also do not add their data to my library.

These are my files, my music. I really would expect a program to read the years and treat them as separate albums.

Do you really think this idea of a third party informing their idcode that has no relation to the music the best means to build up music a library?

Can you imagine that one day this service can be gone for good? Isn't it possible that some other service would be better in terms of quality?

Can you stop, think for a brief moment and tell me if Emby shouldn't treat discs TAGGED with different years as different albums?

Is Emby TAG oriented or MUSICBRAINZ oriented?

Edited May 23, 2021 by EduardoSantos

[Deathsquirrel 745]

1 minute ago, EduardoSantos said:

I do not want to add MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID to my files. May I?

I also do not add their data to my library.

These are my files, my music. I really would expect a program to read the years and treat them as separate albums.

Do you really think this idea of a third party informing their idcode that has no relation to the music the best means to build up music a library?

Can you imagine that one day this service can be gone for good? Isn't it possible that some other service would be better in terms of quality?

Can you stop, think for a brief moment and tell me if Emby shouldn't treat discs TAGGED with different years should be treated as different albums?

Is Emby TAG oriented or MUSICBRAINZ oriented?

That's how you can fix it today in a few minutes.  What you do with that is up to you.

I suppose the devs could add logic to show tracks that have the same Album Artist and Album tags as separate albums if the years are different.  That would take longer and, if it were implemented, would irritate the hell out of a lot of users that download their music instead of ripping it.

[Carlo 4561]

You would NOT need to do this for all albums but just for the two problem albums.

[EduardoSantos 40]

1 minute ago, Deathsquirrel said:

That's how you can fix it today in a few minutes.  What you do with that is up to you.

I suppose the devs could add logic to show tracks that have the same Album Artist and Album tags as separate albums if the years are different.  That would take longer and, if it were implemented, would irritate the hell out of a lot of users that download their music instead of ripping it.

This is the wrong way. This is the way to cause more problems on the future.

I would go further and ask you to consider that an artist can release two different albuns with the same name on the same year. So the "tag oriented" Emby should only join albuns tagged as being "disc x".

[EduardoSantos 40]

1 minute ago, cayars said:

You would NOT need to do this for all albums but just for the two problem albums.

I currently have a huge library. These are nearly a hundred albums. And they would be linked to a third party service I really do not use.

No, sir. I will not do that.

If tag oriented Emby cannot read tags and process them, I will just leave it.

[EduardoSantos 40]

You see, sir, I currently run a lifetime license Emby copy. I have been using Emby from the very first moment. And have been trying to help as much as possible to make Emby better.

I also manage a dozen servers running free, monthly and lifetime Emby licenses.

But if the only suggestion development team has to correct a problem they created is to make users spend days/weeks embedding third party info on their files that would break my heart but there would be no other way to proceed.

[Luke 42079]

It's combination of name + albumartist + mbz id's that make an album unique, so if those are all the same, then they're the same album.

[EduardoSantos 40]

Just now, Luke said:

It's combination of name + albumartist + mbz id's that make an album unique, so if those are all the same, then they're the same album.

There's no mbz on my files. And there will not ever be. 

Year and disc number are tags that should be considered on this "uniqueness".

[Carlo 4561]

100 albums would not take long at all to cleanup (15 minutes or so) as that's pretty small compared to what a lot of Emby users have with tens of thousands of albums.

Emby moving forward is 100% tag driven and was over 90% tag driven before the update to 4.6.  It now respects all the tags vs ignoring them in favor of folder structure which was wrong before and made finding issues difficult.  Now in 4.6 it's quite easy to fix issues as the problem IS IN THE TAGS.

20 minutes ago, EduardoSantos said:

I currently have a huge library. These are nearly a hundred albums. And they would be linked to a third party service I really do not use.

No, sir. I will not do that.

If tag oriented Emby cannot read tags and process them, I will just leave it.

Your media is NEVER tied to any 3rd party provider.  It's just an ID to uniquely identify an album.  Emby uses meta-data IDs all through the system.  Take a look at your different movie and tv show episodes and you will see they all have IDs based on 3rd party meta-data providers.  This is no different then other parts of the system EXCEPT that Emby expects to read this information from the media itself as that is the way MUSIC is supposed to work.

The musicbrainz ID is not mandatory but is helpful.  As long as your other tags are accurate Emby should be able handle your music collection pretty well.

[EduardoSantos 40]

11 minutes ago, cayars said:

100 albums would not take long at all to cleanup (15 minutes or so) as that's pretty small compared to what a lot of Emby users have with tens of thousands of albums.

Emby moving forward is 100% tag driven and was over 90% tag driven before the update to 4.6.  It now respects all the tags vs ignoring them in favor of folder structure which was wrong before and made finding issues difficult.  Now in 4.6 it's quite easy to fix issues as the problem IS IN THE TAGS.

Your media is NEVER tied to any 3rd party provider.  It's just an ID to uniquely identify an album.  Emby uses meta-data IDs all through the system.  Take a look at your different movie and tv show episodes and you will see they all have IDs based on 3rd party meta-data providers.  This is no different then other parts of the system EXCEPT that Emby expects to read this information from the media itself as that is the way MUSIC is supposed to work.

The musicbrainz ID is not mandatory but is helpful.  As long as your other tags are accurate Emby should be able handle your music collection pretty well.

I have alredy informed you that this will not be done.

You see, my .nfo files currently have info regarding the record, professional critics, etc. All these info is translated to portuguese. It is used by me and all my clients.

For more than an year I have been eliminating MBZIDs Emby added to the database without askin me. And I am still doing it.

I am trying to be respectful but you seem not to get the problem here.

Please do not insist that this is a solution. It simply is not.

This is not a problem caused by wrong or faulty tagging. This is a bad tag processing problem. 

Edited May 23, 2021 by EduardoSantos

[EduardoSantos 40]

7 minutes ago, cayars said:

100 albums would not take long at all to cleanup (15 minutes or so) as that's pretty small compared to what a lot of Emby users have with tens of thousands of albums.

I have thousands of albums. Actually 8,732.
A hundred would be the estimated number of problems to solve AFTER finding them on the thousands albums library.

[Deathsquirrel 745]

Just now, EduardoSantos said:

I have thousands of albums. Actually 8,732.
A hundred would be the estimated number of problems to solve AFTER finding them on the thousands albums library.

Finding them is easy FYI.  I had about a dozen albums showing twice in a collection of about 2K albums due to similar tag issues.  Use the reporting tool in Emby.  Export the list of albums to excel.  Use conditional formatting to color duplicate values in the Album column and then filter that column by color to show the dupes.  Open those album in MP3Tag and make the required corrections.

I get that you aren't going to do this, but this tip might be useful for folks that are reading this thread and are open to quickly fixing this kind of issue.

[Carlo 4561]

I apologize to you that Emby is displaying information you provide it via tags that is not what you want.

If you are unwilling to fix your tags so that they are proper we are at an impasse and there is nothing more we can do to help you. Emby in 4.6  IS GOING to display your data according to what the tags tell it to display.

Sorry, I was just going by what you said a few posts above concerning number of albums you have.

37 minutes ago, EduardoSantos said:

I currently have a huge library. These are nearly a hundred albums. And they would be linked to a third party service I really do not use.

 

[EduardoSantos 40]

1 minute ago, cayars said:

I apologize to you that Emby is displaying information you provide it via tags that is not what you want.

If you are unwilling to fix your tags so that they are proper we are at an impasse and there is nothing more we can do to help you. Emby in 4.6  IS GOING to display your data according to what the tags tell it to display.

Sorry, I was just going by what you said a few posts above concerning number of albums you have.

 

I would glady correct any wrong tag. The impasse is that you want to condition the use of Emby to a third party service. As far as this service would bring some value to my library, that would be good.

Impasse is me having to correct a problem that does not exist while you tell the use of the service is not mandatory and refuse to process tags correctly.

[EduardoSantos 40]

I just made a solution similar to the one suggested by you: I put the year as part of the album title.
Emby really separated on different albums.
But it deleted the existing information (in Portuguese) from the .nfo file that was in the folder.

A mess

[simbun 0]

On 23/05/2021 at 16:50, Luke said:

It's combination of name + albumartist + mbz id's that make an album unique, so if those are all the same, then they're the same album.

It looks like things have changed over the years because it now appears to be grouping by just MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID, if populated.

I have both sets of Beatles boxsets (The Beatles and The Beatles is Mono), and can't find a way to stop the albums merging across releases (whilst keeping the tags correct).

If Emby supported DiscSubtitle then I could have converted the boxset into an album, but that's not an option either.

I'm looking for a new server and have limited experience with Emby, so if anyone has any suggestions they'd be much appreciated.

[user24 315]

2 hours ago, simbun said:

I have both sets of Beatles boxsets (The Beatles and The Beatles is Mono), and can't find a way to stop the albums merging across releases (whilst keeping the tags correct).

Hi, your MB links give different top-level MBIDs for these two box sets:

• Name: The Beatles (box set, includes 2009 stereo remasters)
• MBID:   3002658c-fcf9-4f9b-9a41-c96ea3b9e2fc
•  
• Name: The Beatles in Mono (2009 mono remasters)
• MBID:   a5550169-ec99-45b1-827b-2d79c0c0fbb8

(From some limited testing) if these MBIDs are used as embedded metadata in the MusicBrainz Album field, then Emby will import this and should separate correctly, but you will probably end up with two box sets being imported (with the correct overview info) and not individual albums. You could then separate the albums by Disc number, effectively turing the box sets into multi-disc albums.

I also found an old thread with some recent posts that may give more clues/info? There may be others as well???

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/61003-multi-disc-albums-separated-by-disc/page/2/

This may not be exactly what you are after, but perhaps offers some ideas to try? Cheers!

[Happy2Play 9780]

12 minutes ago, user24 said:

Hi, your MB links give different top-level MBIDs for these two box sets:

• Name: The Beatles (box set, includes 2009 stereo remasters)
• MBID:   3002658c-fcf9-4f9b-9a41-c96ea3b9e2fc
•  
• Name: The Beatles in Mono (2009 mono remasters)
• MBID:   a5550169-ec99-45b1-827b-2d79c0c0fbb8

(From some limited testing) if these MBIDs are used as embedded metadata in the MusicBrainz Album field, then Emby will import this and should separate correctly, but you will probably end up with two box sets being imported (with the correct overview info) and not individual albums. You could then separate the albums by Disc number, effectively turing the box sets into multi-disc albums.

Correct they would be two Boxset per those id so all the albums would be tagged as those boxsets not individual albums.  If your albums are tagged per name then yes they will be grouped together as same item no matter how you have them organize.

 

Only one done, might get to the other one later.

Listed as one album with 13 discs

Hmm never noticed Disc 1 was fixed in 4.8.10.0.

[simbun 0]

20 hours ago, Happy2Play said:

Correct they would be two Boxset per those id so all the albums would be tagged as those boxsets not individual albums.  If your albums are tagged per name then yes they will be grouped together as same item no matter how you have them organize.

 

This is exactly what I'm seeing.

So, if you care about the individual albums then the only option is to disambiguate them somehow e.g. add '(Beatles in Mono)' to the album name. Given that I'm looking for a server to feed Symfonium for Android Auto use, retagging isn't an option as otherwise it'll affect my main system.

 

Given the lack of DiscSubtitle support the sensible option would have been to use a:

On 23/05/2021 at 16:50, Luke said:

combination of name + albumartist + mbz id's that make an album unique