No albums in album tab

[fosslinux]

Describe the bug
In the album tab of my music library, no albums are shown. I've checked that my music files have a album tag. I've rescanned the library.

To Reproduce

1. Open music library.
2. Click album tab.
3. See nothing.

Expected behavior
I see my albums.

Screenshots
https://i.imgur.com/69LcEAC.png

System (please complete the following information):

• OS: Docker (running on Raspbian Buster)
• Browser: Chrome, Firefox, Jellyfin Android app, iOS Safari
• Jellyfin Version: 10.3.7
• Reverse proxy: none

Additional context
It occurs for all of my music libraries, for all accounts, on all devices.

[anthonylavado]

This is really, really weird. I have cleared and verified with my test environments that I can get albums.

So the album entry is filled in on your songs? Is there albums listed when you look by artist? How about the default page, Suggestions?

[fosslinux]

Yes, the album entry is filled in on my songs.

I do not know where I'd find albums listed when looking by artists?

Nothing about albums on suggestions.

Wait a second. In my largest library, there are some albums. Investigating.

[fosslinux]

Ahha! The mp3's are being indexed properly for albums, but not my wav's. I edited the tag data with mp3tag (which does support wav despite the name). What did I do???

[anthonylavado]

Ah - I'm not sure we read tags from WAV files at this time... Let me try and replicate here.

[stale]

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[emmyoh]

I’m encountering the same issue. I imported all my songs from YouTube Music, and am using the relevant plugins. The library is configured to pull metadata using the plugins, and the files themselves show album names, but Jellyfin simply refuses to generate album listings

[teisho]

Same problem here. All songs are tagged correctly with album names but not shown under albums.

[update-freak]

I have the same behaviour. There are no albums showed although I have correnctly tagged Flac-files (all in one folder called music with the naming artist - title. Is this a problem, when I didn't have an etxra folder for all artists, which is here descibed: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/music.html With more than 100 titles this could be a lot of folders and sometimes there is only one file in it. Hope that this problem will be solved in future releases. Thanks for the good work!

[update-freak]

Is this issue solved witch 10.8.0?

[1itt1eB0y]

please fix this problem. I have 1000+ songs in my folder... They can be recognized which album they blong to, but can't be loaded in Album page.

Version 10.8.5
Arm64
Docker

[weiyideai520]

我的也无法显示专辑，当可以看到歌曲

版本：10.8.6
操作系统：Linux
架构：X64

[RenautMestdagh]

Having the same problem

Version: 10.8.8
Operating System: Linux
Architecture: Arm64

[keerifox]

There are no albums showed although I have correnctly tagged Flac-files (all in one folder called music with the naming artist - title. Is this a problem, when I didn't have an etxra folder for all artists, which is here descibed: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/music.html

I did a quick test, the following structure A correctly lists the albums:

/LibraryFolderA
    /AlbumFolder
        01 - Song.mp3
        02 - Song.mp3

---

The following structure B does not list the albums:

/LibraryFolderB
    01 - Song.mp3
    02 - Song.mp3

"Users/{userId}/Items" returns an empty set of Items: []. The method for handling that api endpoint is GetItems in Jellyfin.Api/Controllers/ItemsController.cs but it may take a few methods from there to get to the actual cause, so I doubt it's a good place to start..

There are some other symptoms:

1. When viewing an artist's page, the album from the structure B won't be listed, however that is using the same "Users/{userId}/Items" endpoint just with an added filter by AlbumArtistIds.

2. When viewing queue of currently playing songs on the web UI, the link to the album would link to /details?id=undefined&serverId=... if the track belongs to the library with the structure B.

[sevenrats]

reopening for anthony's confirmed label to test. @anthonylavado can you clear up what the desired behavior is here?

[codesalatdev]

I really hope that's not a design decision.
Only having albums listed with a directory structure including the album is not only counterintuitive, but also against the guide saying "You can also seperate your music [...] with no folder structure at all" followed by "[...] songs have no required parameters for filenames since the information will be scraped from metadata."

I'm glad I finally found this issue, since I was under the assumption I was doing something wrong, which made me abandon my jellyfin server two times already.

[mawen-fn]

I also really wish that this will get fixed as soon as possible.

[anthonylavado]

@sevenrats My confirmed label at the time was to keep the issue open for further testing, but I have no notes/comments as I don't use Jellyfin for music (I am a subscriber to streaming services).
The test environment I had at the time was just four files labelled as songs for testing so we'll need to create something.

[sevenrats]

@anthonylavado tmk the currently released music code uses a confusing mix of tags and metadata to accomplish its goal, and has had siginificant changes in unstable already. https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/pull/7514/files

[Ucda1212]

I found the easiest way to fix this is to use MP3tag, drag your music files into the program, click convert, tag - filename and use %artist%%album%%title% to sort by artist, then album

[update-freak]

for me this does not work.
My flac-files are all well taged with MP3-tag, so that there is an artist, album, title and genre.
I also mention this in #9539

[jawhett]

All my songs are tagged with the Metadata correctly but no albums showing up. I confirmed that the file structure change works fine but I'd rather not reorganize my library.

[update-freak]

Any news about that?
I also hope that this will be implemented that the meta data from the falc-file also work instead of having the decribed file structure (with such a file structure I have to many folders -> file structure is also the same for my smartphone, my laptop, etc. --> and I did not want to change my file structure).

[Fragrus]

Any news?
It's really weird, it looks like trying to sit on two chairs. In some cases we rely on folder structure and in other cases we rely on metadata. The end result is some unpleasant moments.

[felix920506]

If I understood this correctly, the issue is that dumping a bunch of music files into the library will not get picked up as individual albums, only when the music files are organized into folders will they get picked up.

This will not be changed any time soon. Please organize your music files according to the documentation. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/music

[codesalatdev]

If I understood this correctly, the issue is that dumping a bunch of music files into the library will not get picked up as individual albums, only when the music files are organized into folders will they get picked up.

This will not be changed any time soon. Please organize your music files according to the documentation. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/music

When this issue was created - and when there were active discussions in here - having no folder structure at all was supported as per documentation, so please understand that I'm not that impressed by you trying to pull an "RTFM" on everyone in here.

The relevant part in the docs was silently changed here, so this should be (re-)submitted as a feature request. Not by me tho - I am no longer using jellyfin.

[Fragrus]

If I understood this correctly, the issue is that dumping a bunch of music files into the library will not get picked up as individual albums, only when the music files are organized into folders will they get picked up.

This will not be changed any time soon. Please organize your music files according to the documentation. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/music

I don't quite understand this position and why this hasn't changed in 5 years. What's the point of using mp3 metadata in the first place then? There's an album and an artist in there, right? Every track. Is there really any difficulty in generating albums based on this data, within the metadata of the songs themselves?

[joshuaboniface]

This issue is getting a little heated.

First, as to why this is how it is. The short answer is, because that's how Emby did it. The parser does not read ID5 (or any) tags from media files themselves. It uses the folder structure to look up Album names and uses that for metadata. That's just how it works. Jellyfin needs you to organize your files into a sensible structure. If that doesn't work for you, then I'm sorry, but it is what it is until someone actually takes on the task of fixing that.

This has not been changed in 5+ years because no one has done so. Yes, that's a tautology. That's what being a "doocracy" entails. If no one wants to fix this up (instead of simply complaining about how it works), then it will never get fixed up. As to why no one has, I don't know personally because I haven't looked at the code in depth (nor am I qualified or capable to do so), but I imagine it's like most of the metadata parsing: it's a mess of spaghetti code that is very fragile and thus scares people off ("because that's how Emby did it").

As to docs, if the docs said something that was patently untrue, then the docs were wrong. That's why they were changed, to actually reflect the reality of how Jellyfin. Now, the issue of that commit providing zero context about its change has been addressed with some stern words to the people responsible, who assure me it will not happen again. But that doesn't change the underlying facts of the matter outlined above.

So, that's where things stand. This remains a bug report, because I believe this is a bug, but the fix to it is not a simple change and thus, would have to be some sort of project.