SOLVED: Music is a mess. Please help.

[nothingveryobvious]

Hello everyone. I would greatly appreciate your help with this.

This is on Jellyfin 10.8.10 via Docker 4.19.0 on M1 Mac Mini.

I used to have music in Jellyfin many versions ago and IIRC it worked really great. A while back I deleted my music library because I was thinking of using something other than Jellyfin, but recently decided to try it again. However, yesterday I imported my music into Jellyfin and everything is a mess. All my music is organized according to the documentation.

Here are some of the problems:

1. Almost all of my artists have more albums than they're supposed to (meaning there are duplicates) or it lists albums from other artists.
   
2. Many of the albums are named the same, with the same cover art or cover art from a different artist.
   
3. Inside the albums there is often just one song repeated over and over again or the same few songs over and over again.
   
4. For some albums, instead of just one artist it has several artists who are not part of the album whatsoever; they are instead different artists in my Music folder.
   
5. In line with the above problem, some albums have songs from completely different artists.
   

What's weird is that before I add music to Jellyfin I always run the files through MusicBrainz Picard first, and yet, it's still a mess.

I've tried disabling all metadata providers and had problems. I've tried enabling just the MusicBrainz metadata provider and still had problems.

Here are some screenshots for the band Dance Gavin Dance and the artist Faye Webster, with descriptions below them.


How my music is organized. Experimenting with a small library for now. The Jellyfin library points to the directory on the left which contains Artists, next is Albums, and finally, songs. Before you say that my problem is because there are albums like "Acceptance Speech" and "Acceptance Speech 2.0" or "Downtown Battle Mountain" and "Downtown Battle Mountain II," I'm still experiencing the above problems for all of my artists, not just Dance Gavin Dance. Plus, I ran all these files through MusicBrainz Picard so I would think all the correct metadata is already embedded in the files.


There should only be 14 albums but there are 15. Many of the albums are named the same.


An album will often have the same song repeated over and over again.


Or the album will have just a few songs repeated over and over. Some of these songs aren't even from the album "Artificial Selection," but remember that the album titles have been repeated, as per my first photo.


Here is how the directory is organized for the artist Faye Webster.


Instead of "Cloud Suites," which is an album by Nico Georis, it should be "I Know I'm Funny haha" by Faye Webster. Even worse, the album art for "Cloud Suites" is instead from an album by the artist Dinner Party. It's a mess.


There's a lot wrong with this. First, at the very top, it lists "Ash Lauryn / Dinner Party / Faye Webster / Nico Georis" when it should just be Faye Webster. Second, it lists the same Ash Lauryn track twice, which shouldn't even be there. Third, it lists "Cumuloids" which is a song by Nico Georis, which shouldn't even be there. Fourth, it doesn't even list all of the tracks (if I were to scroll down) for this album, "Atlanta Millionaires Club."

TL;DR: My music metadata is a complete mess. I run my music through MusicBrainz Picard before importing into Jellyfin. I've tried disabling metadata providers and I've tried enabling only the MusicBrainz metadata provider, but it's still a mess. Please help.

[TheDreadPirate]

I don't have access to my JF right now, but in the library dashboard I think there is an option (not checked by default) that says to prefer the files metadata over the file/folder names?

[nothingveryobvious]

I don't have access to my JF right now, but in the library dashboard I think there is an option (not checked by default) that says to prefer the files metadata over the file/folder names?

Hmm, I can't seem to find that...

[TheDreadPirate]

I walked out to look at my phone. I may have been thinking of when I was running Plex because I don't see it either. imgur is blocked at my work so I can't see your examples, so I will try to help out more when I get home (~5-6 hours).

[overcloker55]

On my instance, the setting exists for shows but not for music.

[TheDreadPirate]

So I was going through my music library trying to retrace some of the troubleshooting steps I took when I experienced something along the lines of what you are describing.

Inspect the metadata of the songs (Edit metadata) or albums and look up that ID on the Musicbrainz's website. Sometimes there are multiple "releases" of an album in different parts of the world and Musicbrainz has separate IDs for each.

I have a couple of the 2 disc special editions of Florence and the Machine's Ceremonials and Lungs albums. It labeled the songs on disc 2 with disc 1 titles because the "release" it had chosen from Musicbrainz was the single disc edition. Turns out there were like 20 "releases" of Ceremonials. My entire library was also run through Picard so the metadata was correct and my folder/file naming scheme conformed to Jellyfin's spec. This is just one of my examples. I had to go through my entire library as I listened to it over the course of several months to keep an eye for misidentified songs/albums/artists. Remixes, special edition discs, lesser known artists were the most common tracks that were misidentified.

I think there are additional folder naming parameters to help JF pick the right release from Musicbrainz. Either way, there will be additional work to get things in order....I know this first hand.

As to why it worked fine before and not now? *shrugs* 10.8.0 was my first version of JF. Different metadata sources?

[TheDreadPirate]

FWIW, I had to do all this with Plex, too. So I'm, unfortunately, familiar with the frustration.

[HingaDergen]

Do you let musicbrainz whipe the tags first?

because my guess (and that was right so many times already when I asked the same question in reddit to users with issues in their music library) is that the extended tags of your files have wrong metadata in them.

What I do to make sure it's correct is to set musicbrainz to whipe all metadata first, and then tag it.

This ensures that there is no wrong data and everything is in order. With this approach I have not had issues so far with a rather large library of also many obscure artists and songs.

[nothingveryobvious]

So I was going through my music library trying to retrace some of the troubleshooting steps I took when I experienced something along the lines of what you are describing.

Inspect the metadata of the songs (Edit metadata) or albums and look up that ID on the Musicbrainz's website.  Sometimes there are multiple "releases" of an album in different parts of the world and Musicbrainz has separate IDs for each.

I have a couple of the 2 disc special editions of Florence and the Machine's Ceremonials and Lungs albums.  It labeled the songs on disc 2 with disc 1 titles because the "release" it had chosen from Musicbrainz was the single disc edition.  Turns out there were like 20 "releases" of Ceremonials.  My entire library was also run through Picard so the metadata was correct and my folder/file naming scheme conformed to Jellyfin's spec.  This is just one of my examples.  I had to go through my entire library as I listened to it over the course of several months to keep an eye for misidentified songs/albums/artists.  Remixes, special edition discs, lesser known artists were the most common tracks that were misidentified.

I think there are additional folder naming parameters to help JF pick the right release from Musicbrainz.  Either way, there will be additional work to get things in order....I know this first hand.

As to why it worked fine before and not now?  *shrugs*  10.8.0 was my first version of JF.  Different metadata sources?

Thanks for this. I'll take a look at the MusicBrainz ID's. Although I don't know how I'd pick the right one on Jellyfin...

[nothingveryobvious]

Do you let musicbrainz whipe the tags first?

because my guess (and that was right so many times already when I asked the same question in reddit to users with issues in their music library) is that the extended tags of your files have wrong metadata in them.

What I do to make sure it's correct is to set musicbrainz to whipe all metadata first, and then tag it.

This ensures that there is no wrong data and everything is in order. With this approach I have not had issues so far with a rather large library of also many obscure artists and songs.

I just tried what you suggested and it didn't help. Thanks anyway.