Hi, I’m new here from a different platform so forgive me for knowing nothing. The other platform is pulling MusicBrainz info so that if you rate a track, all tracks that are supposedly the same recording automatically get the same rating; they basically said to come here because the problems are on this end.
Problem 1 (most annoying but less common): Different recordings are being read as the same recording. Example: The 2-disc “Best of Blur” album has a compilation disc and a live performance disc, but the song “Girls and Boys” is an edited album version on disc 1 and a live version on disc 2 and they’re coming up as the same track, so when I rate one it changes the rating of the other. How do I disentangle them on this end?
Problem 2: (less annoying but more common): Sometimes different compilations & albums aren’t doing the same rating thing for what is clearly the same recording. I’m guessing that just means the compilation track hasn’t been matched up with the album track as the same recording yet. How do I do that?
Find the two (or more!) recordings and look for the ‘Merge’ link in the editing sidebar. That adds the recording to a merge queue where you can review and choose which of the recordings should be merged into.
Currently, you should pick the recording with the most acoustids attached, because (unless this has been fixed recently) acoustids aren’t being properly carried across merges.
I wonder if problem #1 has to do with misplaced acoustids. I see that there was one acoustid linked to both the studio and live recordings until @IvanDobsky unlinked it from the studio version today. If your service is using acoustids to identify MB recordings, that could cause occasional issues.
Plex/Plexamp! Their response to someone asking essentially “what if you had a toggle that said simply don’t get the info from MusicBrainz” was “why would we do that, the problem is upstream”
I see what you’re talking about and was hoping this would have fixed it (thanks @IvanDobsky for linking the examples, which are indeed the two tracks I’m having problems with), but no luck (or at least not yet? I don’t know how instantaneous any of this ought to be).
I’m trying this with VOWWS - Councillor (appears on Occult Box compilation and artist’s album The Great Sun) so if I do it wrong feel free to vote me down. They have the same acoustids already (so maybe the acoustid is not the issue for my Problem 1?).
I haven’t used Plex but it seems it’s not instantaneous:
The exact timing can depend on when you catch things “in the cycle”, but the content will be available within about a day and a half (36 hours) at the longest, and sometimes in as little as a few hours.
My experience is more with KODI than Plex. That uses the MBIDs embedded in the files to tell them apart. So would not get an issue like this on these files. I also don’t think Plex works at an AcoustID level.
For “girls and boys” you’ll need to look closer into how Plex is storing them in your local database. Did your rip app get the correct Disc Numbers tagged into the files, and did Plex read those okay? Did you get these passed into Picard and the RecordingIDs added okay? In picard you should be able to look at these tracks and check the RecordingIDs and see they are different.
It is a little confusing as you’d soon know if Plex had misread your tags as that two CD album would not appear as a two CD album in the correct way. If Plex is showing the two CDs correctly as CD1 and CD2 then I don’t quite understand why it would get its ratings confused.
The rating goes against the MusicBrainz RecordingID. This would mean that “Girls and Boys” on that 2CD album should not have had any issue if you have use Picard to correctly attach MBIDs. Those two tracks have different RecordingIDs if the album was ripped correctly.
The second point with the compilations needs fixing by merging, as suggested above. But not everything can be merged as sometimes compilations use singles, 12" and other versions. Being able to check by ear and\or with AcoustID before a merge is useful to know you have the same track.
I also assume if there is a delay then Plex is running their own clone of the MusicBrainz database to match against.
On a side tangent… I can see by this thread: Rating one song also rates the same song from another album - Plex Labs - Plex Forum that some Plex users get confused by MB treating an original recording and remastered recording as the same recording applying the same RecordingID. RecordingIDs are not there to identify the best audio experience, just to identify the common recording source of a track. With the “girls and boys” example this will not be the same RecordingID