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Broken album displays in music libraries #3169

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niftium opened this issue May 24, 2020 · 16 comments · Fixed by #4968
Closed

Broken album displays in music libraries #3169

niftium opened this issue May 24, 2020 · 16 comments · Fixed by #4968
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bug Something isn't working

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@niftium
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niftium commented May 24, 2020

Describe the bug
Within my music library, several artists have all of their tracks lumped together under one album. The metadata has been checked and should be dividing up tracks by their albums correctly.

System (please complete the following information):

  • OS: Xubuntu 20.04
  • Virtualization: none
  • Clients: Firefox, Android
  • Browser: Firefox 76
  • Jellyfin Version: 10.5.5
  • Playback: all transcoding defaults untouched; no h/w acceleration
  • Installed Plugins: none
  • Reverse Proxy: none
  • Base URL: none
  • Networking: ?
  • Storage: local files

To Reproduce

  1. Go to one of the affected artists in my music library; for this example, I'll use Sea Wolf
  2. Click on Sea Wolf in the artist list
  3. Look at the list of albums and the list of tracks below it. All four Sea Wolf albums are dumped into one album "White Water, White Bloom".

Expected behavior
Checking the metadata on individual songs shows that each file is correctly tagged with its respective album, so I would expect to see separate albums as I do for other artists who show up correctly.

Logs
Playback isn't affected, so no error is shown.

Screenshots
See the attached screenshot of the Sea Wolf page.

Additional context
I was able to fix one such issue with a different artist by taking the period out of a song "Mr." --> "Mr" and doing a metadata refresh. I suspect Sea Wolf is breaking because of the comma in the album name above. I suspect other songs/albums of being the culprit(s) of other broken artists. For example, all Oasis (the artist) tracks are lumped under the album title "(What's the Story) Morning Glory?". Another example would be the artist Doves; all of their tracks are lumped into the album "The Best of Doves: The Places Between".

sea_wolf_example

@niftium niftium added the bug Something isn't working label May 24, 2020
@NovaCyntax
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NovaCyntax commented May 27, 2020

I have this same issue. My library is properly sorted in other media players, and the file hierarchy is proper. I am willing to relay additional information or try certain things as-needed.

If I were a betting man, I would not wager that the issue is explicitly-related to special characters, although with a large collection such as mine there are some examples of special characters breaking. Instead, it appears as if the phenomenon occurs when a music file is contained outside of a folder, e.g. a single which is not a part of an album. I have two documented examples, and can give more if necessary.

This first example is a directory which contained two singles outside of traditional album folders, e.g. "Artist Name" -> "song.mp3", as well as traditional albums alongside them, "Artist Name" -> "Album". I removed these singles, yet the issue remains. I will re-scan my library tonight and report back IF it fixes the issue. As of now, it was not enough to rectify the issue. The single in question was a song called "Barren and Breathless Macrocosm", which, if you look at the album art in the screenshot below - is also the album art for the album "Melancholy".

image

Below is the file hierarchy of the image above (which should appear correct, but wasn't at the time of the library scan):

image

This next example is of a directory which contains a single which is not contained within its own folder, as well as albums which are in their own folders. Singles which are not contained within their own folders appear to be used as the metadata for the album image, but not as the title.

image

As before, below is the file hierarchy of the image above (note the single "DNA War" is used as the album art in the above image):

image

I can confirm yet another instance of this occurring when singles are present within a directory, and am willing to bet that the issue is present in each directory that I check where this phenomenon is present. If that is the case, then there is a good chance that this is a user-issue versus a Jellyfin issue, at least until Jellyfin is capable of properly processing the phenomenon. I will report back tomorrow if the examples above have been fixed through a library re-scan.

Tldr; Jellyfin at the moment appears to require singles to be contained within their own folders, or it will break when displaying the directory as a whole.

@niftium
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niftium commented May 27, 2020

The issue with the artist that I was able to correct was with an artist that only has two albums and no tracks residing outside of their album's proper folders.

Screenshot of artist-level hierarchy:
Screenshot_2020-05-27_09-13-28

Screenshot of artist > album-level hierarchy (for affected album):
Screenshot_2020-05-27_09-13-13

By removing the period in the track "Mr. Midnight", I was able to get the albums to divide out correctly again in Jellyfin.

However (and this is important!):

What NovaCyntax is describing is also definitely true. I was able to fix a number of my broken artists by moving singles into their own folders under the artist hierarchy. Not all, but most. I have at least one instance where a track residing outside of the proper folder structure does NOT break the directory view. I'm going to spend some more time going through my folders to see what remains broken. I've read about wonky behavior due to unexpected folder structures, but I can't recall if that was here or on Reddit.

@NovaCyntax
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NovaCyntax commented May 27, 2020

I can confirm on my end that moving singles to a folder will prevent this behavior from occurring, pic related following a re-scan.

image

If I run into specific instances of special characters breaking sorting in the future, I will provide examples. May be of interest to note that this phenomenon can occur based on two (possibly more) conditions.

@MegaS0ra
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Same issue here.
The issue appeared after adding single songs in the artist folder. (Found out one of the albums had a song named "J.J. the Baker").

But for me, just moving the singles to their own folder didn't solve the problem (am I missing something?)
I had to rename the song without the dots, and after the automatic re-scan, it showed properly.
I renamed it back with the dots, and it's still okay.

@niftium niftium changed the title Special characters appear to break sorting Broken album displays in music libraries May 28, 2020
@niftium
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niftium commented May 28, 2020

Since we appear to be dealing with multiple forms of breakage, I updated the bug title to more accurately reflect the core issue.

@NovaCyntax
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Same issue here.
The issue appeared after adding single songs in the artist folder. (Found out one of the albums had a song named "J.J. the Baker").

But for me, just moving the singles to their own folder didn't solve the problem (am I missing something?)
I had to rename the song without the dots, and after the automatic re-scan, it showed properly.
I renamed it back with the dots, and it's still okay.

In my case, each single had to have its own unique folder. A folder named "Singles" containing all singles ended up being displayed incorrectly within the library as well.

@niftium
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niftium commented May 28, 2020

Same issue here.
The issue appeared after adding single songs in the artist folder. (Found out one of the albums had a song named "J.J. the Baker").
But for me, just moving the singles to their own folder didn't solve the problem (am I missing something?)
I had to rename the song without the dots, and after the automatic re-scan, it showed properly.
I renamed it back with the dots, and it's still okay.

In my case, each single had to have its own unique folder. A folder named "Singles" containing all singles ended up being displayed incorrectly within the library as well.

Interesting. I just dumped everything into a folder called "Random" for each artist and got the mostly-good results that I did.

@NovaCyntax
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I operate within a Linux environment, so I just wrote a quick bash script to find each file with a .mp3 extension within first-level directories, and for each found match it would create a folder titled the name of the track, and move the track to the folder. Re-scanning my library now, if there are any organization issues in the future it will likely be due to special characters/formatting in titles and such.

@stale
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stale bot commented Sep 25, 2020

This issue has gone 120 days without comment. To avoid abandoned issues, it will be closed in 21 days if there are no new comments.
If you're the original submitter of this issue, please comment confirming if this issue still affects you in the latest release or nightlies, or close the issue if it has been fixed. If you're another user also affected by this bug, please comment confirming so. Either action will remove the stale label.
This bot exists to prevent issues from becoming stale and forgotten. Jellyfin is always moving forward, and bugs are often fixed as side effects of other changes. We therefore ask that bug report authors remain vigilant about their issues to ensure they are closed if fixed, or re-confirmed - perhaps with fresh logs or reproduction examples - regularly. If you have any questions you can reach us on Matrix or Social Media.

@stale stale bot added the stale Stale and will be closed if no activity occurs label Sep 25, 2020
@niftium
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niftium commented Sep 25, 2020

Using a combination of all of the workarounds mentioned above, I think I've squashed all of the instances of this happening on my system. I still believe this behavior is broken though.

@stale stale bot removed the stale Stale and will be closed if no activity occurs label Sep 25, 2020
@GarrickWinter
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I've encountered this issue today, after adding a new album I bought from Bandcamp to my library. I already had an existing folder for this artist's music in my library that Jellyfin had been correctly displaying, but after adding this one everything suddenly got lumped into one mega-album.

None of the album's tracks had any periods, but one did have a comma, so I removed that. I also removed commas from all other filenames in that artist's folder. I should also note that I did previously have a single not in its own album that seemed to have worked fine, but after reading this thread, I stuck it in a folder of the same name alongside the other albums.

After taking the above steps and re-scanning the library, the artist's albums were displayed correctly again. So something is still wrong.

Version: 10.6.2
OS: Windows
Architecture: X64

@GarrickWinter
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This happened again with another artist. This time the only thing I changed to fix the issue was moving singles or otherwise uncategorized songs that were in the artist folder directly (alongside album folders, rather than in an album folder) into their own album subfolders.

@niftium
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niftium commented Nov 15, 2020

This happened again with another artist. This time the only thing I changed to fix the issue was moving singles or otherwise uncategorized songs that were in the artist folder directly (alongside album folders, rather than in an album folder) into their own album subfolders.

If you pull them out of that folder and leave them at the artist's root directory, does it break again? That's the other side of the breakage coin - re-breaking, once fixed, isn't consistently reproducible for me.

@GarrickWinter
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GarrickWinter commented Nov 15, 2020

Woah. I tried that - I took one song from one of the newly-created album folders, cut it, and pasted it back to the root directory.

The result was that when I opened that artist in Jellyfin, I still saw all the albums, so they didn't merge back into one... but any album I clicked on had no tracks in it at all.

I'm only able to find tracks by that artist through the search functionality, and when I view them and play them, they have artist information but the ones that are in album folders and don't have album metadata don't display their albums at all.

The ones that do have album metadata on the files themselves, well, they list the correct name of their album, but when I click on the album name in the track view, it brings me back... to the exact same huge mega-album where all the tracks were dumped before I fixed this, and I can see all the tracks in this faulty album, even though I can't access that faulty album in the artist view (it shares the name and art of a legitimate album, and when I click on that from the artist view, I get the empty album).

Thankfully, sticking that one file back in its folder fixes it all again.

@Mange
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Mange commented Nov 22, 2020

I can confirm the same issue in my library; a lot of artists have all their songs grouped into one of the albums. Seems to happen mostly on artists where I have a random track not part of an album directory.

I assume the artist's directory got tagged with the random track's album, and hence all other tracks in the hierarchy ends up under that album since it inherits the parent's metadata instead of its own…?
I checked the metadata tree under the admin, and strangely it displays all the albums as nested under the root for some reason.

Here's my structure:

music/
  Artists/
    Some Artist/
      Album 1/
        1. Track 1.mp3
        …
      Some Good Track.mp3
  Soundtracks/
    Some Movie/
      …

Yet, the metadata tree shows this as

music/
  Artists/
    Album 2/

If I click on "Album 2", assuming this is one such "merged" album, I see it's pointing to music/Artists/Some Artist, but has a Title set on it matching the album. "Some Good Track" happens to come from "Album 2".

image

@Mange
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Mange commented Nov 23, 2020

I rebuilt my entire library from scratch to force all tracks to be under an album directory, and now I don't have that problem anymore.

Now I only have to deal with the redundancy of Jellyfin trying to identify things that are already correctly tagged and misidentifying things, and not being able to handle things that don't exist in MusicBrainz. That's an unrelated issue, of course. 😄

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5 participants