Ignore metadata

[IronHorse]

Good day all,

Is there a way to disable ALL metadata use in Jellyfin and strictly use directory/file names?

The basis for this question is that my mp3 collection has been growing for a very long time (25+ years) with albums/tracks from a great many sources, meaning that the metadata across these files is very inconsistent as is the format of the file names. The only thing that's consistent is that each album is its own subdirectory under a single parent directory. The subdirectories DO follow a consistent naming scheme.  Some files have almost all ID3v1 and/or ID3v2 tags populated, some have no populated tags at all, and others have every variation possible between those two extremes. The collection is over 1700 albums and 22k files. The inconsistent metadata makes the sort and display in Jellyfin very haphazard and difficult to use. 

In particular, I have some anthology albums in which each of (for example) 13 tracks is tagged with the name of the artist so instead of having a single entry for the album, Jellyfin displays this as 13 different entries splattered across its entire listing. 

Editing the metadata on 22k files is not an option for obvious reasons.

This seems like it would be a very simple flag to ignore metadata as Jellyfin handles directories/files without any metadata just fine. I feel like I'm missing something obvious. I've crawled through the forums, I've crawled through various files within Jellyfin, I've crawled through the documentation. Help please?

Thanks,
IH

[TheDreadPirate]

The movies, shows, and music library types are pretty rigid in requiring metadata and folder structures to conform to a standard. AFAIK, there is no way to just show folders in the music library type. I've never tried the music VIDEO library for for audio files, only actual music videos, but that library type does NOT read in any metadata and just shows files and folders. But then you may lose a lot of the music centric behaviors for playback.

The folder structure you describe IS supported, but Jellyfin is very dependent on tags. Musicbrainz makes an app called "Picard" that will auto-magically tag your music and even embed album covers.

I'm not sure how much extra storage you have, but I made a backup of my music just in case Picard screwed things up. But, so far, I haven't found an instance where it completely got it wrong. If Picard isn't sure it will tell you and it will preview the original vs new data before it commits the changes.

[IronHorse]

The movies, shows, and music library types are pretty rigid in requiring metadata and folder structures to conform to a standard. AFAIK, there is no way to just show folders in the music library type. I've never tried the music VIDEO library for for audio files, only actual music videos, but that library type does NOT read in any metadata and just shows files and folders. But then you may lose a lot of the music centric behaviors for playback.

The folder structure you describe IS supported, but Jellyfin is very dependent on tags.  Musicbrainz makes an app called "Picard" that will auto-magically tag your music and even embed album covers.

I'm not sure how much extra storage you have, but I made a backup of my music just in case Picard screwed things up.  But, so far, I haven't found an instance where it completely got it wrong.  If Picard isn't sure it will tell you and it will preview the original vs new data before it commits the changes.

Thank you, I appreciate you taking the time to answer.