Generate AcoustID Fingerprints

I have uploaded some songs into unclustered files. I clicked clusters. Some of them are moving to clusters but some files are remaining in unclustered files. Why is that? Also generating AcoustID fingerprints is not generating acoust ID from some files.

How do you see that AcoustID is not generated for some files?

What’s the audio length of the files missing an AcoustID?

Picard tries to group files into what it thinks belongs together into one release based on existing artist and album information. If you have files which do not have any other file with matching album tag then those will stay alone.

First it is important what you are actually using: Are you using the “Scan” button (find matching recordings by acoustic fingerprint) or the “Generate AcoustID fingerprints” action?

If you use scan it will calculate the fingerprint, search for a matching AcoustID using this fingerprint and then load the corresponding recording in the right pane. If a file gets loaded this way to the right it should have an AcoustID tag set. If not this can mean that:

  • There is no matching AcoustID for the file’s fingerprint
  • There is a matching AcoustID for the file’s fingerprint, but it is not linked to any MusicBrainz recording
  • Querying the AcoustID server produced an error of some sort
  • The fingerprint for the file could not be generated. This is rather rare and either means the file is broken in some way or the audio format is unsupported by the fingerprinter.

If fingerprinting works or not you can see if you enable the fingerprint column. Files with generated fingerprints will have a fingerprint icon shown in this column.

If you use just the “Generate AcoustID fingerprints” only the fingerprinting is done without web lookup. If it worked you again should see the icon in the fingerprint column. There is no AcoustID in this case.

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Or that the audio bit is too short. I don’t remember the exact threshold (3 seconds? 5 seconds?), but e.g. 1 second clips aren’t AcoustID-iable.

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