I use Jellyfin for my music collection, and sometimes the album artist and artist fields for the same artist will be populated slightly differently. For instance, I have one case where there are three different ways using &, 'and' and +. I have removed these from my library, updating them with manually with MusicBrainz Picard to use the same spelling, and reuploaded them to my server. However, it uses the old metadata still.

Is there a way to efficiently reset metadata for only certain albums so that these three instances are merged and I can access all three albums from the same album artist?

EDIT: So I managed to get this working now. What worked in the end (unsure if all steps are necessary) was to remove all the files from the server, run a rescan, delete all the albums (they would still be in Jellyfin with a blurred album cover), rescan again, and now the artists would be gone. When I added the albums again, the new metadata would be used.

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[–] AMillionMonkeys@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The server certainly should have picked up the change in metadata but I can't help you with why it didn't.
I can suggest that you edit the metadata in Jellyfin rather than using external tools and moving items in and out of the library. Just click the three-dot menu for a track or album and choose "Edit metadata". If it doesn't pick up changes made from Jellyfin then something is very wrong.

[–] cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago

Hm, the only metadata I can see on the album level is the MusicBrainz IDs. That could explain why it is behaving this way, because MusicBrainz is the reason they are different to begin with, and I've had to force the change. I could change on the song level, and that was indeed the old values. However, changing these also did nothing.

All the three different artist versions have them same MusicBrainz artist ID. I tried to change these now into all using &, and it does change it, but now I have three identical entries instead. Trying to select them all and click "Group versions", it just spins and nothing happens.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yesterday I spent close to 1½h to fix my genres in my music library.
There were some entries like EDM;Dance;Pop;Dubstep Instead of individual entries.
For specific entries I think you'd need to refresh + replace all metadata entries in the metadata or fixing the entry with the correct release group id.
I use .nfo files alongside the media. I usually delete them when some metadata get's "stuck" during refreshes.

[–] cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Can you do the refresh + replace all metadata for a single item, or would that trigger replacement of all metadata? (I asked a similar question under another comment here)

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago

You should be able to do that when you open the options on the media entry

[–] dueuwuje@aussie.zone 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I had this exact same issue and many other odd things. The best advice I can give that worked for me was to one by one take each album off my server pass it through music brains (this looks for and edits metadata) and then place it back into Jellyfin.

It was well worth it in the end. I couldn't get Jellyfins metadata to work reliably for me, but this was the only issue I have had and the good Jellyfin provides once you have it 'cleaned' up is fantastic.

[–] cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It is what I have tried, but Jellyfin still does not want to recognize the new metadata. :/

[–] dueuwuje@aussie.zone 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Did you try also deleting all of the old metadata, to try to get it back to a clean slate

[–] cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Can you do this on an item by item basis? I have forced some changes before (with much effort and then randomly succeeding after some time, I might add), and I would hate for that to be reverted.

[–] dueuwuje@aussie.zone 2 points 1 week ago

This is how I did it, after I put all of my music in jellyfin without thinking. At the end there was one or two artists/albums I couldn't get to convert properly.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago

I would start using lidarr instead. Uses musicbrainz as well and can do the library management as well. Imo better than something like picard.
I only used picard in the beginning to fix my unsorted library and prepare for import in lidarr.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I had a similar issue (different media types but) where Jellyfin would not, for any bleeping reason, update the metadata to reflect changes in the media.

After an annoying amount of fiddling I just yanked the library in it's entirety (as in, it was deleted) and then re-added it and on the new-library-scan everything updated.

Annoying, and maybe not entirely viable depending on how your library is structured - I have ~6 libraries for different things, so it wasn't that big of an issue - but it did resolve it.

[–] cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 weeks ago

I might need to do this at some point, but then I'd want to resolve all these small issues I have. I really wish it would be possible to just change it directly. I'll look for an issue on GitHub and submit one if I can't find it.