Need to manually identify every album?

[vamarci]

Hi all,

New to Jellyfin, installed it a few days ago, I was using Plex before.
Overall, Jellyfin server and Symfonium app on Android better fits my needs, I like it more than Plex + Plexamp. However, I am encountering an issue that I am not able to solve, looked around everywhere for an answer with no success: none of my albums in my music library gets identified automatically by MusicBrainz or AudioDB. If I enter the Musicbrainz ID manually, it works, finds the right release. But I was hoping that this could happen via an automated process, based on the metadata in the music files (MP3 and FLAC, 99% are with correctly populated metadata for artist, album, track titles and numbers, release year and some also for label and catalog number). So based on this it should be possible to automatically match the releases I think?

Could anyone help me out with this please?

[TheDreadPirate]

Plex is definitely way better with Music metadata than Jellyfin. But when I made the switch to Jellyfin I had to run my Music through Musicbrainz's Picard app for additional tagging. Once I did that, most of my music was properly identified.

[vamarci]

Actually, the main reason I switched from Plex was because in my experience, Plex was horrible in handling metadata of music. Jellyfin seems better even without identifying the albums.

But: the issue is that I am running Jellyfin on a remote server, + the content is also seeded so I cannot write into the actual files (which I presume Picard would do). So I am looking for a solution, of possible, that involves the Jellyfin database and not the actual metadata of the files.

[TheDreadPirate]

Jellyfin is very reliant on tags/metadata for music. If whatever files you have don't have filled out tags then Jellyfin will have a hard time identifying files. I don't think Jellyfin uses file names or folder structure much/at all for identification. Some people (monsters really) have put all their music in a single massive folder, but it worked for them since everything was tagged.

[bitmap]

Why not hardlink? Create "copies" by hardlinking the files in a new location, organized by how you wish to have them organized. No duplication of disk space, plus then you can modify metadata. As far as I know that still won't create a full additional copy of the data. This is how the *arr suite recommends handling seeded data.

[vamarci]

Thanks for the reactions!
All the files have correctly populated metadata, with the exception of about a tenth of them missing album artwork and genre. So the issue is not with identifying files in that have missing metadata, but identifying those in Musicbrainz that have perfectly matching metadata.
Regarding folder structure and hardlinks: good idea actually, but my issue is not with Jellyfin wrongly organizing my music. That is actually already fine, but I would like the style/genre fields + artwork to be pulled from Musicbrainz, as these two metadata fields are not always well documented, while the rest is perfect so no issue there.
Also, how could hardlinking files allow me to change their metadata? I thought that when hardlinking there is one file in two places. So to my understanding, it would not be possible to change the metadata of the file only in one of the locations (so both would have to be changed).