Music scan and display of metadata

[oramol]

Hi there,

I've got problems with the scanning and display of metadata.

I'm starting to create a music library. Therefore I edit the metadata of the files with easytag beforehand so that the songs, albums, interprets etc. are displayed correctly. Unfortunately, the music app displays several files wrong. There is a wrong album or interpret despite of the fact, that the information is tagged correctly. So, when I look at the file with easytag all information is tagged correct, but when I look into the Nextcloud Music library they are wrong.

I tried all kind of syncing and rescan but cannot get rid of the display errors.

The audio player app displays the songs correctly.

It's really annoying as I put quite an effort in the creation of all the metadata and hoped, it would make a nice library.

Maybe someone could help or has an idea where the divergence of the metadata comes from.

Thanks a lot!

[paulijar]

Does the metadata show up incorrectly also in the track details pane of the Music app (opened with the little "i" icon after the track name)? Or only in the main view of the Music app?

[oramol]

Does the metadata show up incorrectly also in the track details pane of the Music app (opened with the little "i" icon after the track name)? Or only in the main view of the Music app?

It differs. So two examples:

One track which is displayed wrongly has the correct metadata in the information panel. So the track is listed under a false interpret (it seems like its the folder from the file path) and has a wrong album and title. But if I look in the information the track title, album and interpret are correct.

Then I have a few tracks which are listed under a false album. So the first half of the album is displayed correctly including the album title. Then the second half of the same album is listed under a different album name (which is wrong). When I look into the information it is the same wrong name. But when I try to edit the metadata the data is correct. I even tried to change it several times to "test" and back again, but it doesn't solve the mistake.

[paulijar]

Okay, this tells us that Music can scan the metadata but the data indexed in the database is out-of-sync with the file contents.

Presumably, you have modified the file metadata directly in the filesystem of your server. This is something that Nextcloud is not designed to handle. That is, Nextcloud now doesn't know that those files have been modified and it can't tell to the Music app that those files should be rescanned. The intended way to use Nextcloud is to modify the files only via the web UI or the sync-clients on PC or mobile.

You may now force Nextcloud to detect the file changes by running a command like

sudo -u www-data php occ files:scan <username>

After that, Music should prompt to rescan the changed files on the next reload.

The files:scan may take a significant amount of time if your instance has a huge number of files. Your other alternative is to execute

sudo -u www-data php occ music:scan --rescan <username>

With this, the Nextcloud server itself will still not know about the file changes but the Music app is forced to re-index all the files, regardless of if they have changes or not. This alternative cannot handle any added or removed files but it does work for changed files.

On both of the commands above, you may also use the option --help to find some additional options.

[oramol]

Okay, this tells us that Music can scan the metadata but the data indexed in the database is out-of-sync with the file contents.

Presumably, you have modified the file metadata directly in the filesystem of your server. This is something that Nextcloud is not designed to handle. That is, Nextcloud now doesn't know that those files have been modified and it can't tell to the Music app that those files should be rescanned. The intended way to use Nextcloud is to modify the files only via the web UI or the sync-clients on PC or mobile.

You may now force Nextcloud to detect the file changes by running a command like

sudo -u www-data php occ files:scan <username>

After that, Music should prompt to rescan the changed files on the next reload.

The files:scan may take a significant amount of time if your instance has a huge number of files. Your other alternative is to execute

sudo -u www-data php occ music:scan --rescan <username>

With this, the Nextcloud server itself will still not know about the file changes but the Music app is forced to re-index all the files, regardless of if they have changes or not. This alternative cannot handle any added or removed files but it does work for changed files.

On both of the commands above, you may also use the option --help to find some additional options.

Thanks a lot! I already did a rescan but this doesn't change the error. Nevertheless, I was able to fix the albums which were listed under their filepath. Sadly, the albums which are displayed with false metadata were not affected (second example:

Does the metadata show up incorrectly also in the track details pane of the Music app (opened with the little "i" icon after the track name)? Or only in the main view of the Music app?

It differs. So two examples:

One track which is displayed wrongly has the correct metadata in the information panel. So the track is listed under a false interpret (it seems like its the folder from the file path) and has a wrong album and title. But if I look in the information the track title, album and interpret are correct.

Then I have a few tracks which are listed under a false album. So the first half of the album is displayed correctly including the album title. Then the second half of the same album is listed under a different album name (which is wrong). When I look into the information it is the same wrong name. But when I try to edit the metadata the data is correct. I even tried to change it several times to "test" and back again, but it doesn't solve the mistake.
)

[oramol]

Curiously, I have this album from which one half is displayed correctly and the second half is not. As I looked into the detailed information, the metadata from the second half isn't correct as well. So I re-snced the folder connection (as to make sure I get the most recent version and not an old local one or something) but the editor displays the metadata correct, so I cannot change it. So I don't know where the wrong metadata comes from.

[paulijar]

It might be that those files have multiple types of tags, like ID3v1 and ID3v2.x if those are MP3 files. And if these tags have conflicting values, then the Music app could select the wrong one. In the still unreleased development version, I have actually disabled the ID3v1 parsing by default as this tag type is rarely used nowadays. In the latest released version, there's no way to control this behavior.

[oramol]

I tried to edit the file with an editor which can edit id3v1. There is nothing displayed in the id3v1 section.

[oramol]

But other than that you don't have an idea/solution which can solve the listing problem? It's very frustrating to invest so much time in the metadata and very unsatisfying that some albums are listed twice with different titles (and only half of the tracks). But really thanks a lot for your help, I learned something new and was able to fix some of the displaying errors!

[paulijar]

Would it be possible for you to share one of those problem files with me? My email can be found from my GitHub profile.

[paulijar]

The sample file revealed that the problem was caused by a Lyrics3 tag containing the wrong album name. The Lyrics3 parsing will be disabled by default in the forthcoming Music v3.2.0, as well as parsing of ID3v1 (if needed, these tags may be enabled by editing config.php).