Ok, so i am only a few days old to MusicBrainz. So far so good. Unfortunately, when i lookup of scan and album such as ( A Perfect Circle - Three Sixty ). it comes back saying that 3 songs are NOT from the album. and that one of them “Gravity - Live” is actually by COLDPLAY. I have had this issue with several albums. I understand if it is a pieces parts album, from several sources. but this is a full 2 disc album. so why is it erroring like this? Please help.
If you get completely wrong results when using Scan like the Coldplay example this means some AcoustId is attached to the wrong recording on MB. In this case MB has to rely on the help of users like yourself who can identify the wrong match and correct it.
There is a recording “Gravity (live)” by Coldplay, I assume somebody attached the AcoustId for the A Perfect Circle recording there by error. Have a look at the fingerprints of the Coldplay recording and see if you find the one that matches your files. To see it use “Scan” on your file and then look at the metadata below, there will be a row with “AcoustId” set. If you find it, unlink it from the Coldplay recording on MusicBrainz. Then move your files to the proper track of the correct album and use “Submit AcoustId” to submit it to the correct recording.
Also some general rules you should follow especially when dealing with complete albums:
- Always cluster the files before doing a Lookup (unless you are really only tagging single files or clustering does not work)
- Always use Lookup first and only fall back to Scan if lookup fails or you know it won’t give good results because your existing tags are real bad (“Track 01” by “Unknown artist”) or missing completely
- Check the results before saving
The difference between doing the lookup on clustered and unclustered files is that with a cluster Picard will try to match the entire cluster of files to an album. When doing a lookup on individual files the files will be treated independently. Picard still tries to prefer already loaded releases, but still clustering gives better results.
The difference between Lookup and Scan is that Lookup uses existing metadata while Scan ignores the metadata and only looks at the audio. This also implies that Scan does not care about the album, so it has more potential to scatter found matches across multiple albums.
2 Likes