Different music albums showing merged since last update to emby server 4.6.2

[gerd.de.munter 1]

It looks like the new way to determine an album starting from the ID3 tags, is not able to cope with different albums, which do have the same name, but from another year and are from the same artist.

The example I have here is from Kim Wilde, there are 2 albums, named "The Very Best Of Kim Wilde", one from 1984, one from 2001.

Then emby is showing these as being 1 album, see screenshot. There is some kind of workaround for this problem, by renaming the album title to resp. The Very Best Of Kim Wilde (1984) and The Very Best Of Kim Wilde (2001). Then all is OK.

Could the year/date also be taking in account in order to show this as 1 album or not. This is just one example, there are more albums like this

 

Edited June 20, 2021 by gerd.de.munter

[Carlo 4561]

Hi, this would appear to be a tagging issue.  I would check/adjust the album artist tag to make sure each of these being merged in unique to the artist.

Once you fix those tags, you should be good.

Let us know how you make out.

[Happy2Play 9783]

17 minutes ago, cayars said:

Hi, this would appear to be a tagging issue.  I would check/adjust the album artist tag to make sure each of these being merged in unique to the artist.

Once you fix those tags, you should be good.

Let us know how you make out.

This will happen to all same name albumartist/albums, already identified in testing.

Possible workarounds is musicbrainz has versions you would need to ensure each album has a different mbzalbumid.  Not sure if this can be don't without mbzids.

In my example there are 20 versions of the Bayou Country album.

71f9d4f7-a7eb-4c08-bf05-7d71dca91a38

a2b47f68-b249-46f1-94cb-f8df1bcf78a1

 

[Luke 42085]

If the songs are tagged with different musicbrainz album id's, then that should get them into separate albums.

 

[Luke 42085]

@gerd.de.munter has this helped?

[gerd.de.munter 1]

@luke : I don't have the musicbrainz album id's as ID3 tags inside my music files, to add this, it will be a huge job. FOr now, the easiest workaround I did font out way making sure the albums do have a different title, in fact suffix the title with the year of release. 

[Luke 42085]

51 minutes ago, gerd.de.munter said:

@luke : I don't have the musicbrainz album id's as ID3 tags inside my music files, to add this, it will be a huge job. FOr now, the easiest workaround I did font out way making sure the albums do have a different title, in fact suffix the title with the year of release. 

Yes that's another option as well. Thanks for the feedback.

[Happy2Play 9783]

@cayarscould this be in the KB.

To prevent same named album merging with different years/versions will require different mbzalbumids or if not using mbz, different album titles in embedded metadata to maintain separate albums.

[Carlo 4561]

On 7/8/2021 at 4:02 AM, Happy2Play said:

@cayarscould this be in the KB.

I added a note section right under the tagging section https://emby.media/support/articles/Music-Naming.html

Let me know if that is ok or if it should be changed.

Edited November 6, 2025 by GrimReaper
KB article link updated

[gerd.de.munter 1]

For me that is looking OK now. I did now try with a few of the problem albums, where I have the same title/artists, but different release year. If you first set the musicbrainz album-id/artists-id, then Emby works as expected. So indeed advised to first tag the music files with these id's