merging music artists

[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