I’ve been dabbling with jellyfin lately. It doesn’t seem to like my mp3 organization, which Plex had no issues with. I generally use artist/album/songs, though there are exceptions that seem to be tripping up jellyfin. For example, I split compilation cds into the appropriate artist’s directory (so, artist/song), and it doesn’t seem to know how to deal with that. There are also a few weird things floating around, but those might be due to bad id3 tags in the mp3s.
I know there are some issues with mp3 tags in some songs. For example, my wife’s *NSync or N-Sync (or whatever the hell they are, I don’t actually care) mp3s seem to have the artist name in different formats, so that’s not helping matters at all.
Also, in fairness, jellyfin kind of got a bum start on my system - I installed it and started it, but I didn’t have enough space on /var for everything, so the system started having problems. To get it running, I stopped jellyfin and just deleted the metadata directory (getting the server running in general was much more important than getting jellyfin working). I’ve since allocated more space to /var, and I had jellyfin reread all of the libraries, which seems to have been mostly successful. (It looks like I had the same issue with Plex, because I had moved its metadata /var directory to the media drive, but I forgot for jellyfin.)
I do hope the new version includes some features that are just personal preference, like for example I’d prefer the “artist” view to be first in the Music section, not albums. And I’d like to sort albums within the artist by year, not name (I suppose I could go in and give it the year as the sort key, but I don’t want to have to do that for every artist). These are personal preferences, of course, not breaking bugs.
Overall it seems like a decent replacement for Plex. I watched an episode of the Simpsons using it last night on our FireTV, and it worked fine.
Since you mentioned the /var directory, I’m gonna guess you’re running a *nix server of some kind. I use easytag for audiobooks and Picard for all my music that lidarr couldn’t figure out. You can match your lidarr and Picard renaming formats so that everything is organized consistently. I tend to leave compilations / soundtracks/ various artists albums in their own directory and leave any artist level grouping as a task best handled by a database tag filter in the player.
Correct, running Linux. The actual songs/movies/shows are in a media array (a 15 terabyte RAID5 array that could be replaced by a single drive now); /var is where jellyfin (and plex for that matter) store their metadata.
You probably know about it but there’s a great program for Windows (I’m not sure about other platforms) called MP3TAG which handles (re)tagging like nothing else
I didn’t, but I use Linux anyway. Musicbrainz.org offers a program designed to do that, too. I’m a little hesitant to run it on my collection of mp3s without some smaller tests first though.
Picard (the MusicBrainz program in question) absolutely needs hand holding. When I decided to do the initial run through of my library, I went artist by artist and album by album. There’s a temptation to just throw everything at it. But there are enough releases and re-releases, and instances of a single song/recording being on multiple albums that it was much less headache to never try to more than one album at a time. That hand holding is a good thing in my opinion despite the tedium. There’s just too much content for any automated system to reliably handle all the match collisions. Lidarr works because it more or less goes album by album too. Lidarr can do a pretty good job of screwing everything up though, so that’s the one to keep separate or be very careful and test settings thoroughly. I’m still finding weird ways that lidarr has mangled stuff I’d already tagged and renamed with Picard because of a badly formed renaming format string in lidarr’s settings.
The was playing with Picard this afternoon. It did a good job finding what I had, though it seemed like it was updating the mp3 data before I was hitting save. I need to play with it more to understand it better.
Once it finds a match, it will show you a comparison of the tags for each file before and after. Maybe that’s what you saw. As far as I know, it only writes the tags and renames the files once you hit save. If there is an option to write the tags before you choose to save, I’ve never seen or used it. You can of course choose to not rename the files and just fix the tags.
Yeah I think the interface confused me at first, I figured it out last night. Basically you are matching files in the top left to the top right (either automatically or manually). Once it matches it shows the before and after at the bottom, then click save to update the file. Useful!
I was having issues getting Jellyfin to update some data, in particular release date/year, even after using Identify on them and pointing to the correct album. I had to manually update that info for several of albums. Maybe the incorrect info in the mp3 tags overrides what it gets from the internet. That would explain it.
I’ve used it on my collection, album for album. It usually works great with the autodetect-function, but it gets some albums horribly wrong (or not at all), so I am glad I did it piece by piece. Took a long time, but now I just need to do it every once in a while when I add something to the collection.
LOL the “horribly wrong” is the part that worries me. We already have good mp3 tags for most of the collection, so I don’t want to make things worse. Thanks for the info, though.
It seems jellyfin is confused by songs that have two artists, like duets. It can handle it at the song level, but those “merged” artists appear (as a separate artist) at the artist level too.
And I finally put my finger on what’s wrong with the default view: It says “albums” but collection albums show separately under each artist that has a song on that album. That makes sense for the album-artist view, but not albums. Albums should combine those, in my thinking at least.
LOL the “horribly wrong” is the part that worries me. We already have good mp3 tags for most of the collection, so I don’t want to make things worse. Thanks for the info, though.
Most commonly the issue is that it guesses the wrong album release, and puts any extra tracks in a separate compilation album. The songs are still tagged right, but the album is wrong. The worst problem I’ve encountered is when all songs were tagged completely wrong (different names etc.). Happened once or twice for me, but enough to not want to do everything in one go.
It seems jellyfin is confused by songs that have two artists, like duets. It can handle it at the song level, but those “merged” artists appear (as a separate artist) at the artist level too.
I don’t have this issue. I separate the artists with a semicolon, so it is displayed “Artist 1, Artist 2” with each artist being clickable to go into their individual artist page. But I think you could actually tag ‘artist’ as “Artist 1 & Artist 2” and ‘artists’ as “Artist 1; Artist 2”, and it will show up correctly, i.e. displayed as “Artist 1 & Artist 2”, but shown in the artist overview separately as “Artist 1” and “Artist 2”. I think…
I don’t have this issue. I separate the artists with a semicolon, so it is displayed “Artist 1, Artist 2” with each artist being clickable to go into their individual artist page. But I think you could actually tag ‘artist’ as “Artist 1 & Artist 2” and ‘artists’ as “Artist 1; Artist 2”, and it will show up correctly, i.e. displayed as “Artist 1 & Artist 2”, but shown in the artist overview separately as “Artist 1” and “Artist 2”. I think…
Yeah, going in and fixing them individually seems to clean it up (I probably should check that more closely)…but we have a LOT of duets, it seems.
I’ve been dabbling with jellyfin lately. It doesn’t seem to like my mp3 organization, which Plex had no issues with. I generally use artist/album/songs, though there are exceptions that seem to be tripping up jellyfin. For example, I split compilation cds into the appropriate artist’s directory (so, artist/song), and it doesn’t seem to know how to deal with that. There are also a few weird things floating around, but those might be due to bad id3 tags in the mp3s.
I know there are some issues with mp3 tags in some songs. For example, my wife’s *NSync or N-Sync (or whatever the hell they are, I don’t actually care) mp3s seem to have the artist name in different formats, so that’s not helping matters at all.
Also, in fairness, jellyfin kind of got a bum start on my system - I installed it and started it, but I didn’t have enough space on /var for everything, so the system started having problems. To get it running, I stopped jellyfin and just deleted the metadata directory (getting the server running in general was much more important than getting jellyfin working). I’ve since allocated more space to /var, and I had jellyfin reread all of the libraries, which seems to have been mostly successful. (It looks like I had the same issue with Plex, because I had moved its metadata /var directory to the media drive, but I forgot for jellyfin.)
I do hope the new version includes some features that are just personal preference, like for example I’d prefer the “artist” view to be first in the Music section, not albums. And I’d like to sort albums within the artist by year, not name (I suppose I could go in and give it the year as the sort key, but I don’t want to have to do that for every artist). These are personal preferences, of course, not breaking bugs.
Overall it seems like a decent replacement for Plex. I watched an episode of the Simpsons using it last night on our FireTV, and it worked fine.
Since you mentioned the /var directory, I’m gonna guess you’re running a *nix server of some kind. I use easytag for audiobooks and Picard for all my music that lidarr couldn’t figure out. You can match your lidarr and Picard renaming formats so that everything is organized consistently. I tend to leave compilations / soundtracks/ various artists albums in their own directory and leave any artist level grouping as a task best handled by a database tag filter in the player.
Correct, running Linux. The actual songs/movies/shows are in a media array (a 15 terabyte RAID5 array that could be replaced by a single drive now); /var is where jellyfin (and plex for that matter) store their metadata.
I follow what lidarr does. Worked great so far on my cases of adding custom tracks I didnt want to submit to musicbrainz.
You probably know about it but there’s a great program for Windows (I’m not sure about other platforms) called MP3TAG which handles (re)tagging like nothing else
I didn’t, but I use Linux anyway. Musicbrainz.org offers a program designed to do that, too. I’m a little hesitant to run it on my collection of mp3s without some smaller tests first though.
Picard (the MusicBrainz program in question) absolutely needs hand holding. When I decided to do the initial run through of my library, I went artist by artist and album by album. There’s a temptation to just throw everything at it. But there are enough releases and re-releases, and instances of a single song/recording being on multiple albums that it was much less headache to never try to more than one album at a time. That hand holding is a good thing in my opinion despite the tedium. There’s just too much content for any automated system to reliably handle all the match collisions. Lidarr works because it more or less goes album by album too. Lidarr can do a pretty good job of screwing everything up though, so that’s the one to keep separate or be very careful and test settings thoroughly. I’m still finding weird ways that lidarr has mangled stuff I’d already tagged and renamed with Picard because of a badly formed renaming format string in lidarr’s settings.
The was playing with Picard this afternoon. It did a good job finding what I had, though it seemed like it was updating the mp3 data before I was hitting save. I need to play with it more to understand it better.
Once it finds a match, it will show you a comparison of the tags for each file before and after. Maybe that’s what you saw. As far as I know, it only writes the tags and renames the files once you hit save. If there is an option to write the tags before you choose to save, I’ve never seen or used it. You can of course choose to not rename the files and just fix the tags.
Yeah I think the interface confused me at first, I figured it out last night. Basically you are matching files in the top left to the top right (either automatically or manually). Once it matches it shows the before and after at the bottom, then click save to update the file. Useful!
I was having issues getting Jellyfin to update some data, in particular release date/year, even after using Identify on them and pointing to the correct album. I had to manually update that info for several of albums. Maybe the incorrect info in the mp3 tags overrides what it gets from the internet. That would explain it.
I’ve used it on my collection, album for album. It usually works great with the autodetect-function, but it gets some albums horribly wrong (or not at all), so I am glad I did it piece by piece. Took a long time, but now I just need to do it every once in a while when I add something to the collection.
LOL the “horribly wrong” is the part that worries me. We already have good mp3 tags for most of the collection, so I don’t want to make things worse. Thanks for the info, though.
It seems jellyfin is confused by songs that have two artists, like duets. It can handle it at the song level, but those “merged” artists appear (as a separate artist) at the artist level too.
And I finally put my finger on what’s wrong with the default view: It says “albums” but collection albums show separately under each artist that has a song on that album. That makes sense for the album-artist view, but not albums. Albums should combine those, in my thinking at least.
Most commonly the issue is that it guesses the wrong album release, and puts any extra tracks in a separate compilation album. The songs are still tagged right, but the album is wrong. The worst problem I’ve encountered is when all songs were tagged completely wrong (different names etc.). Happened once or twice for me, but enough to not want to do everything in one go.
I don’t have this issue. I separate the artists with a semicolon, so it is displayed “Artist 1, Artist 2” with each artist being clickable to go into their individual artist page. But I think you could actually tag ‘artist’ as “Artist 1 & Artist 2” and ‘artists’ as “Artist 1; Artist 2”, and it will show up correctly, i.e. displayed as “Artist 1 & Artist 2”, but shown in the artist overview separately as “Artist 1” and “Artist 2”. I think…
Yeah, going in and fixing them individually seems to clean it up (I probably should check that more closely)…but we have a LOT of duets, it seems.