Incorrect music albums

[rmi]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to Jellyfin and just started to import my music collection in small pieces. I have read in many places that Jellyfin's music recognition is not very good and I am just facing a problem with this too and wondering if anyone has a good workaround to stop the mess.

I have some old tracks in my collection that do not have any Album tag - they were either never released on an Album or the album info cannot be recovered. I have these in a folder called "Singles" (under several genres which are added as separate folders to the music library). However, if any of them happen to have an Album tag, Jellyfin will assume everything is from this album even if there is no Album specified for those songs.

How can I tell Jellyfin to ignore the folder structure and just rely on tags? This would greatly help with the overall organization, which seems to be very limited in Jellyfin requiring all sorts of compromises and workarounds.

E.g. my music collection looks something like this currently:

Music/[Genre]/[Language]/Artist/Album
OR Music/[Genre]/[Language]/Artist/Singles
OR Music/[Genre]/[Language]/Album
OR Music/[Genre]/[Language]/Singles

To even make this work at all in Jellyfin, I'm forced to add each subfolder as a separate folder under the Music collection e.g.

Music/HipHop/HU
Music/HipHop/CZ
Music/HipHop/EN

These are all added separately to the Music library and there are lots of these for various genres and languages right now., which is already not ideal to manage manually.

The first problem I noticed is that some albums are not merged between the folders. E.g. if I have some tracks in one language in one folder and another track from the same album but coming from a different folder, then Jellyfin would show me the same Album twice even if I have them perfectly tagged with releaseId from MusicBrainz and album names, Jellyfin just can't recognize it.

The other problem is with Singles. Originally, I didn't even had the "Singles" folders, I introduced it recently just because of Jellyfin to be able to see loose files, but seems to be not working very well. Let's say I have the following:

Singles/Artist A - Track1 - no album tag
Singles/Artist B - Track2 - album tag = Album B
Singles/Artist C - Track3  - no album tag

Then Jellyfin will just assume that all tracks in this folder came from Album B (which is an album from Artist B only), then it will create an Album merging every single artist from the folder and thus ruining the original Album B from Artist B.

How can I stop this? Any suggestions?

I would really not want to allow a tool to dictate how I store my music collection, because from experience the collection usually outlives different technologies and software, I would like to make the software adjust to the way my music is stored. Is Jellyfin a suitable product for this? If not, that's perfectly fine too, and I'll try to look out for alternatives - any suggestions?

Thank you in advance for any advise.

[EliteAlien]

Jellyfin and music can be a massive pain sometimes. Though, there really isn't a good way to split your stuff up like you're describing. It leads to a mess and Jellyfin doesn't have a merge option for music like it does TV & Movies. Which also leaves your home screen with a absolute mess. You only option is basically make one music folder then sub-folder things.

What I do is something like this.
Artist -> Compilations -> Compilation Album (Year) -> Music Files
Artist -> Album (Year) -> Music Files
Artist -> Singles Name (Year) -> Music Files
(I have not tried this but I believe Artist -> Singles -> Music can be used now)

Also, it seems like you're over complicating things with genre folders. Because you can apply that to the metadata of the files themselves. MusicBrainz Picard is great for that, and it even has a function to listen to the music and match it to a potential song using a scan option. It's pretty good at finding matches, but there are sometimes it fails. Yet, that is one thing I would heavily suggest doing on these "Unknown" music files. If it doesn't seem right you don't have to save the metadata to the file or you just don't like something, you can modify the metadata to your liking.

Settings to use with Picard. I suggest going to Options -> Options -> ID3 -> 2.4 -> UTF8. I've had to recently convert my tags over to 2.4 on a lot of my music as something that changed in Jellyfin 10.10.3 has made a lot of my musics metadata change into "Artist;Artist" or "Artist/Artist" instead of properly selecting them. Possibly a regression, but this is the nature of using Jellyfin for music currently. One day it will hopefully be much better.

Anyway, there isn't much else to be done other than enter your own metadata in the files, load the provided ones with say Picard, and not over complicate your folder structure.

[pixel24]

Yes, it seems that Jellyfin does not focus on audiophile users. Personally, I prefer to provide Jellyfin with perfectly tagged data from the start. As mentioned earlier, Picard is an excellent program for this purpose. It is also a powerful tool that can be highly customized to fit your needs. You should take some time to familiarize yourself with it and work with copies of your files while learning.