merging music artists

[quixotic120]

I have a large library of music within jellyfin that is tagged to match musicbrainz 100% with beets.io. However, tagging this way (or with musicbrainz picard, for that matter) results in a directory structure and tags that highlight collaborating artists instead of the primary, especially for singles.

e.g. a folder structure that looks like this

first artist 
first artist  featuring second artist
first artist featuring third artist
fourth artist
etc.

the id3 tags reflect this as well.

this is preferable for archival purposes as it matches musicbrainz 100%. However, for convenience's sake when browsing my library I would like to condense these entries to ensure as many as possible have artwork and browsing is as simple as possible. 

essentially I want to make the above list just

first artist - contains what it did plus entirety of first artist ft. second artist and first artist ft third artist
fourth artist
etc.

I have tried several things to make this happen, mostly unsuccessfully or at least not repeatable. Is this something that can even be done? I mainly am viewing the "album artist" tab in music. 

What I have tried:

changing the "sort" names to match and doing a library scan - this just places the entry next to the desired artist, which is what was expected. 

changing the artist names to match and doing a library scan - similar to the above, would just place them next to the desired artist

changing the name and musicbrainz id to all match then doing a library scan - this appeared to work but really just made the other entries with ft artists disappear from the library listing. They still existed if I searched but there was no way to access them from the directory. I am currently rebuilding my music share because I could find no way to actually bring them back, changing the entries back did not seem to help. Deleting and rebuilding the music library seemingly that though as they are coming back as the library rescans. 

a few other observations - changing the sort name worked at least once although I have no clue why and could not replicate it despite trying numerous times to do so. Changing the artist name appeared to work a few times randomly in a similar fashion but I believe it was just making albums disappear like what ended up happening later.

Is there a way to do this?

[TheDreadPirate]

Music is tough to get right. A lot of ways to organize it. Many different behaviors depending on what tags are available.

I'll do some testing and get back to you. Probably won't get around to setting up the test until Thursday evening.

[quixotic120]

thanks for looking into it! in the meantime I'll keep playing around as well and will update if i find anything that works

[quixotic120]

after rebuilding my library (took quite some time, kind of large) noted the following:

for the most part things returned to normal however some of the artists I did successfully get to merge stayed merged. these artists are mixed and some are problematic. on the initial scan all did not populate with artist metadata. however, manually refreshing the metadata fixed that for many. but for some this does not work. I can scan and search for for missing metadata instead of "replace all" and this partially fixes it - this will sometimes populate the artist image and description within the artist card but the artist image does not display on the library feed of artists.

interestingly if I manually select an artist image for the problematic artists they become "unstuck" and then all metadata becomes available again:
listing before selecting an image, have tried refreshing metadata manually with library scans between refreshes:


same listing, only change was to select an artist image by searching for fanart via the UI, backing out to home screen, refreshing the page, and going back to artist listing. initially the only change will be that the artist image will change but if you back out to home and go back (not sure if the page refresh is necessary) the logo, backdrop, and artist info suddenly appear.


this applies to many artists I was messing with upon further investigation; only a small handful stayed merged but the vast majority did not. almost all I attempted to merge ended up with this issue though. It appears deleting the share and re-adding it is not enough to reset the metadata though and as a result I am still missing albums that ended up "disappearing" when failing to merge. Some artists are stuck lost and can't find artist art; it appears uploading local art does not help if it cannot find a match. Using "identify" does not help for matches that are in this "stuck" state.

Additionally I have at least one entry that is somehow duplicated:

both lead to the same entry and albums but the one missing artist art has no metadata, no poster/logo/artist info whereas the one with artist art is complete. If I try to identify they both lead to the same path as well (/media/music/Daft Punk) but the metadata is different; the add dates are different, the one without artist art is missing musicbrainz id and artist info whereas the one with art is complete.

one lead that is somewhat promising:
I got an artist to merge by doing the rename all artist ft artist1 to just "artist" and changing the musicbrainz id y to the "artist" musicbrainz id on each, overwriting if there was a conflicting one or adding if there was none.
This results in the above issue occurring but you can't search for artist art and you can't add manually because it's still tied to one of the linked combined artists that won't have art. But if you run "identify" and do the primary artist, over and over for as many artists as you've linked you'll eventually get back to a proper artist card. However, you'll still have the issue where merged albums don't show up, only the primary ones that are linked to the primary artist. This happens even if all the albums are in the same directory (e.g. even if all the albums are under /music/artist if the tags have album artist as artist ft whoever they won't appear).

so for now I'm rebuilding my library again because ultimately I'd like to figure out a way to start from a clean slate. I think an approach based on that last bit may be to just "identify" artist ft whoever as primary artist but I can't test it at the moment as my library is rebuilding again. And even when it does rebuild I now have the problem that there appears to be phantom metadata sticking around from all this mucking about that's screwing me up, e.g. "freddie gibbs" did not ID correctly last time I rebuilt because it was thinking that entry was built up of "freddie gibbs" + "freddie gibbs & madlib" + "freddie gibbs & the alchemist" all merged together even though it was a fresh build of the music library.

edit: rebuilding again did not fix the broken metadata issues. These can be fixed by doing the manual identify trick. however, this still results in missing albums. I have gotten this to work as intended exactly 1 time and I have no idea why this worked and it didn't work for others.

/data/music/Gorillaz feat. Andre 3000 & James Murphy/DoYaThing

was merged into the main "Gorillaz" artist. This was done by changing the artist to "Gorillaz" and the musicbrainz id to the Gorillaz musicbrainz ID. This lead to the single being stuck there through rebuilding the music library 2x. I can't see what the artist name and musicbrainz ID are anymore because they're within the category, so the assumption is they're still the same.

This led to the Gorillaz card being broken as described above but unlike the others it had artist art and poster, just no info or logo. After the second rebuild I did identify and noted it was searching based on the "Gorillaz feat. Andre 3000 & James Murphy", manually overrode to just "Gorillaz" with refresh all info and grab new images, now it's perfect with all albums displayed. But this is the only one that is working.

Doing this exact procedure for other artists has every other time caused the albums to simply disappear from the listing, although they can still be searched for and listened to, still show up in listing of albums, etc. just won't show up under the album artist card. Very confused at this point

and the superfluous daft punk card was very weird - i identified that and got many undefined entries with IMVDb, which shouldn't even be possible as I don't have that enabled as a scraper. I get a Daft Punk musicbrainz entry after several dozen of those and when I clicked on it I was taken to a blank screen for about 20 seconds, then eventually it did load the option to refresh metadata. I selected that and it deleted the superfluous entry. odd but either way it's sorted.

Now that the library is rebuilt I did try identifying "artist ft whoever" as "artist" - this scrapes the info for the primary artist but does not merge them together so the library still has "artist", "artist ft whoever", etc. but they just all have duplicate metadata

it's late now though, will mess around more tomorrow. appears to be possible, just finding the way to do it repeatably

[quixotic120]

anyone have ideas or thoughts on this? shameless bump bc i've been messing around with variations of the above mentioned techniques but nothing reliably combines artists. is this really not possible without changing the music tags?

edit: is it possible to tie an entry to multiple paths? i've tried a few different ways and none have worked, I think that may be related.

[TheDreadPirate]

I haven't found a good way to handle this. But I plan to try to clean up my Music library in the near future. If I stumble across a better way to handle this I will come back and update.

[quixotic120]

thanks. in the meantime is there a way to reset the library for real? I can delete my music share and re-add it but that doesnt stop the saved broken metadata I've created from messing around with things. I have a bunch of artists now who dont load background art or bios and it would be easier to just start from a clean slate but I genuinely can't figure out how short of torching my jellyfin install and that would not be ideal because I'd lose my custom metadata for other libraries.

[TheDreadPirate]

Try removing the library from Jellyfin then go to Dashboard > Scheduled Tasks and run the clean up jobs. Also, are the artists that don't have images featured artists or guest artists?

[quixotic120]

Try removing the library from Jellyfin then go to Dashboard > Scheduled Tasks and run the clean up jobs. Also, are the artists that don't have images featured artists or guest artists?

thanks, that definitely changed something, guest artists now have artist images which implies that some of the changes I was making are now being "pulled out" of the primary artist identification and pushed onto the guest artists. but the stuck metadata issues are still there unfortunately

essentially my problem now is this:
primary artist (using Gorillaz as an example for clarity) would have artist image but display no bio and poster. this is (i think) because in my tinkering the entry has multiple paths assigned to it. If I click "identify" for "Gorillaz" and refresh info it will still be messed up, but if I then refresh the page and "identify" again it will now show the path as /music/Spacemoney x Gorillaz/ instead of just /music/Gorillaz because that was one of the artists that was merged. 

If I go through this process n times for all the paths that were merged it eventually fixes the display but I just want to get a clean slate at this point because merging this way does not work as discussed above. It will remove the guest artist from the album artist listing but the primary artist will still only list albums within the main path (e.g. /music/Gorillaz) so merged guest artist albums just end up in limbo. 

plus at this point after all this tinkering my music library metadata is just a mess. I don't think the way forward is doing this via jellyfin. I use beets.io to tag my music and that doesnt have any easy way to tag music in this manner, it tags to musicbrainz guidelines, but in researching musicbrainz picard appears to have a plugin that can tag music with a bit more control - see: https://github.com/rdswift/picard-plugin.../README.md . I don't love the idea of retagging my entire library to not be 100% with musicbrainz standards; would much rather just potentially edit metadata to create easier browsing but it is what it is I suppose. but before I dig into that I need to be able to have a clean slate because as of right now deleting the library and reimporting the music doesnt make a difference, the changes I made stick around no matter what I do, seemingly

edit: have also tried going into /config/metadata and deleting all entries within the artist folder. this again improved things but there are still several problematic artists that have multiple paths tied to one entry with seemingly no way to undo this. What's very frustrating is that for some artists it works:


listing that was naturally added with merged paths - I had merged this prior to rebuilding the library with all the above destructive steps and it simply appeared merged. With this most recent rebuild after destroying the nfos in the artist folder in metadata everything on the card displays correctly - album art is correct, poster, artist art, bio shows up, etc.



images showing the 2 albums in the listing are in fact located in separate directories, tags match directories names


however, a different artist (should be Charli XCX) that was merged prior to the rebuilds shows up completely broken. album art and genre tags are correct but everything else is missing. the poster in the back is just what was randomly there while browsing library. No idea why this one is broken and the other works. the 3rd album in the row (remix single) is merged from another directory. Interestingly if i try to identify this artist:


i get a directory that I had merged in but then merged out, said single is no longer listed under Charli XCX and is again under the main library:


at one point I could identify this, refresh the UI, then identify again and it would move on to the next directory tied to the listing (e.g. ID Charli XCX and it would ask to id /music/Charli XCX ft. Sam Smith, do that, refresh, ID Charli XCX and it would ask to ID /music/Charli XCX/ but that is no longer the case.

refreshing metadata, identify, don't do anything unless I manually select new images to replace the blank images. then if i do that i get a page that has images but no bio:



and this is also a very tedious process to have to go over for potentially dozens of artists. At this point I assume I will have potentially have to just erase jellyfin and start over, which sucks, because I'll lose my watch status and other library custom metadata and such, but such is life. I did not realize that library metadata would stick around like this even after libraries were removed, that is really not ideal.