Fixing ID3/meta data issues

I’m running Mopidy on a Raspberry Pi and now that everything seems to be setup correctly and scans all my media, I’m trying to figure out why some albums are split into multiple albums and some artists appear multiple time.
I understand the basic concept that Mopidy-local searches the ID3 tags for matching tags, especially musicbrainz tags.
While I can manipulate the tags with Picard or Kid3 I still struggle with getting the db to scan and fix the necessary entries as a simple scan doesn’t seem to pickup these changes. Clearing the db every time I want to try a fix, just takes a lot of time.
So I’m wondering what I can do to stream line this.
I know about testing my metadata with Troubleshooting — Mopidy 3.2.0-8-g145c1d1e documentation (thanks to @kingosticks).
A simple example:
Using 'python3 -m mopidy.audio.scan ’ with two files originally showed that one file was missing musicbrainz artist info and thus it created two artists (which makes sense).
I added it to the second file, rescan and refresh Iris, but there are still two albums.

Is there a faster way to test metadata changes?
Are there any tools that would help with that? I know about beets – but didn’t see that it helps with fixing metadata (more like replacing mopidy-local) and eyed3.

Thank you in advance.

When you say rescan, does it actually update the file you changed? It should emit a lot message if it did consider an update was required. I’m open to suggests how we can make mopidy local easier to debug with these. Maybe through some extra scan commands like passing a specific file path.

With ‘rescan’ I was just referring to running the ''local scan" command again.

At the moment, because it takes so long to ‘clear’ and ‘scan’ the entire music directory, I try to fix multiple albums at once. There is so much debug output that it’s hard to find the changes. The reason for the ‘clear’ is because mopidy otherwise doesn’t seem to pickup the changes. My suspicion is that that’s probably a misperception because the changes I’m making to the ID3 tags aren’t showing up. But that is more likely a result of me trying to fix the metadata with trial and error rather than understanding of how to properly fix it.

It’s probably also a reflection that the tools I’m using aren’t always working so well e.g. Picard is pretty amazing for existing albums, but no real help for others. Kid3 seems to somehow write non standard ID3 tags…at least according to Picard.

II like the notion of being able to scan a specific directory, like an album or artist or even a single file just from the sake of speed and simplicity. It might help to output the debug statement of a file as name, value pairs instead of SQL insert statements) for readability. ‘python3 -m mopidy.audio.scan …’ does I decent job, but it’s pretty unwieldy for an entire album – a spreadsheet like output would make it easier to compare…

You can see here how Mopidy-Local decides when an update to a file is required during scanning. If you have modified the file’s metadata the mtime for the file should have changed compared to what Mopidy-Local stored last time and so it should re-scan the file.

I too have found fixing metadata very painful. I have started the task many times but never completed it. People do rave about Beats but I’ve never tried it.

In terms of the logging readability, we could try only increasing the verbosity of certain logging statements to get rid of the noise. Maybe even just tailing the log and grepping the output would work well. Perhaps also using something like jq to improve the format. There’s also some decent sqlite GUI programs where you can view the database directly.

I’ve been looking at the tags ingestion to get a better understanding of what matters in the file’s meta data.

I plaid a little bit with beets but if I understand it correctly it fixes the metadata in the db. I’d much rather prefer fixing it in the actual music files so that if I loose the db rescanning will pick it up again…

I do like the idea of more control over the process like triggering a scan of a subset of the music directory. It might also help to delete an album out of the db…but that’s more because I don’t trust the process yet ;-(

What about summary reporting? Like output all the albums that don’t have an image? Or output duplicate albums or artists (by name).

I’ve been using DB Browser for Sqlite to look at the database.

The meta data issue seems to come down to 3 issues:

  1. Missing images – don’t see how Mopidy could help with that
  2. Duplicate Artists – seems to be mostly caused by Artists existing with and without a musicbrainz id. Could Mopidy provide a feature to find duplicates and if one has a musicbrainz id update the one without one?
  3. Duplicate Albums – not sure yet if that is the same problem as with artists or difference in musicbrainz ids?

Any idea where and how to dig in with Mopidy-Iris for this metadata issue?

The db tells me I have one album but Iris shows them as two. Out of some odd reason, it puts the first two in the query below into it’s own album.

I deleted the IndexedDB and cleared all site data in the browser and refreshed it…

sqlite> SELECT artist, musicbrainz_artistid, album, musicbrainz_albumid, track_name, musicbrainz_trackid from search where  album = 'Poinciana';
Ahmad Jamal|cf816800-4e0e-4d80-9cca-50a725e93787|Poinciana|2b3dcd70-d79c-4628-9f80-f599f4341d91|Poinciana|d1bc1139-bc81-4182-a662-5f495ce81c3d
Ahmad Jamal|cf816800-4e0e-4d80-9cca-50a725e93787|Poinciana|2b3dcd70-d79c-4628-9f80-f599f4341d91|You Don't Know What Love Is|9ca0197d-aa73-44c5-84c3-815aff0e5b7a
Ahmad Jamal|cf816800-4e0e-4d80-9cca-50a725e93787|Poinciana|2b3dcd70-d79c-4628-9f80-f599f4341d91|A Gal in Calico|8f43b09f-0d4c-427b-85c3-01d09ad1173e
Ahmad Jamal|cf816800-4e0e-4d80-9cca-50a725e93787|Poinciana|2b3dcd70-d79c-4628-9f80-f599f4341d91|Ivy|9ce35ec7-c010-4d58-a7c8-1301044597aa
Ahmad Jamal|cf816800-4e0e-4d80-9cca-50a725e93787|Poinciana|2b3dcd70-d79c-4628-9f80-f599f4341d91|Tater Pie|b97c8023-3f91-40b8-86bc-4bbbe361c5d4
Ahmad Jamal|cf816800-4e0e-4d80-9cca-50a725e93787|Poinciana|2b3dcd70-d79c-4628-9f80-f599f4341d91|Autumn Leaves|2992089e-6277-4bd1-98bc-7db8fcc1598c
Ahmad Jamal|cf816800-4e0e-4d80-9cca-50a725e93787|Poinciana|2b3dcd70-d79c-4628-9f80-f599f4341d91|This Can't Be Love|08fec4ea-982b-44f3-b3d1-4257fedf701e
Ahmad Jamal|cf816800-4e0e-4d80-9cca-50a725e93787|Poinciana|2b3dcd70-d79c-4628-9f80-f599f4341d91|Ole Devil Moon|a47c356e-0c80-43c7-b8d2-4dc9ceb15465

I was able to fix this the same way as outlined here: Albums are split into multiple albums.

The files used different codex…converting the two files to the same codex did the trick.

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