Deleted Metatags, excepet title and artist, but it keeps finding a recent release not the original!?

[CAMSinc]

Hi Everyone, this is my first post.
I have tried looking at various posts but was unable to get the answers, so here it goes…

I have a library of 15,000 Songs. They have been downloaded from various online sources , CD rips, and record label downloads. It is for a radio station so everything is legal - even if downloaded online.

Anyways, they way it is now, there are many files without Genres. I cant play the files because many of the albums data are compilations and wrong, and the original dates of the songs are wrong and basically I have 15,000 songs, with lots of wrong data linked to them.

I downloaded 100 songs to test the musicbrainz picard tool.
I keep getting two major issues.
1, That when i drag and drop the files into the left screen, many are converted into “non-album-tracks” or other “mix compelation***” type album files. Both the listing of the album as “non-album tracks” is not acceptable, and also the incorrect albums are not acceptable.

2, when I purposefully delete the meta data and keep only the artist and title, for example Marvin Gaye - What’s going on - (length 3:53) it finds a file, it saves it as “non-album tracks” and puts incorrect metadata saying it is ISRC: USMO10000523/USMO17100041 (which links to a 2007 release of the song), and puts a picture of a band called “30 seconds to mars” as the image… (who knows why) i’m not sure what Jean-luc Picard would say about that lol.

when I click the file on the right hand window (it is green here) and press look up in browser it takes me to the page. ITEM 1 is the correct (1.1) catalog number 11190 Marvin Gaye What’s going on 1971 Motown records - IS the correct CORRECT listing and its ISRC is USMO10000523.

Why is Musicbrainz Picard not getting the right info from online and matching it up with the song? if it is stuffing up most of the sample of 100 songs with a random album name and the wrong release dates, i don’t want to think what it will do with 15,000 songs…

Your help is appreciated community.

Thank you.

[outsidecontext]

To start, deleting metadata in order to get better results is usually a bad idea unless the existing data is totally wrong. You basically give Picard less information to work with and expect it to give you better results. At the very least, if you have the album name in the tags already, leave this in

Also did you use “Scan” or “Lookup”. As a rule of thumb always use “Lookup” unless this does not return the result you want. If you have multiple tracks from the same album also make sure to “Cluster” before doing “Lookup”. Only if “Lookup” fails, gives wrong results or there is absolutely no usable existing metadata on the song (e.g. “Track 01”) use “Scan”. “Scan” will analyze the audio, which can help you identify the correct recording. But since only the audio is used “Scan” has no way to detect the exact album.

Now to your example of “Marvin Gaye - What’s going on”. If you look at the recording on MusicBrainz you will see that it has been released on a lot of releases, hence you probably are likely to get a compilation if your files have no album info at all. When I tried to look this up with a test file which had only artist and title set I also got one of the compilations, when I instead also set the album title to “What’s going on” I got this album. I’m also a bit confused by your statements, you said both that the recording with ISRC USMO10000523 is both wrong and correct. Since there is only a single recording with USMO10000523 I assume correct is correct.

If Picard does not load the release you want you can always manually load any release into Picard. For this use the built-in search or in this case use the “lookup in browser” button on the matched recording or album. Once you have opened a search this way you will see green “tagger” buttons next to releases and recordings when you browse musicbrainz.org. Clicking this tagger button for a release will load the release into Picard. Clicking on the green tagger button next to a recording will instead load only that recording (as a non-album track).

What actually should never happen is that Picard loads this example as a “non-album track” by itself, since this will only happen if a recording is not linked to any release. What version of Picard do you use?