I have got a question regarding the the basic release-picking principle and I couldn’t find holistic answers:
Say, there a two releases with exactly the same content but e. g. different dates because in country A the respective CD has been released 1 year earlier than in country B, but identical content. Then, it makes senses for MusicBrainz to have two releases within the same release group.
If I now convert both CDs into, e. g. FLAC-files, the resulting files and folders will look exactly the same, so it is not possible to precisely tell, which release should be taken.
My first question: 1. How does Picard in this case choose which release it automatically takes?
I guess it can’t “properly”, so maybe I want to do it manually. Is the fastest way to do a right click on the release -> other versions and compare what can be seen there, and, if this is not sufficient, select the different version and then to do a comparison “by heart”? Or is there a feature directly highlighting the differences in the versions so that I can quickly tell the detailed differences?
To summarize: How can I make sure within a fast workflow in Picard that I am aware that there is the danger that Picard automatically picks a version which does not have Snoop in the artist field and how can I in this case quickly choose the right version?
Ideally, you’d know which CD is which because you have it in your possession. Alternatively, there is a technique called acoustic fingerprinting… maybe you could read up on that and see if it fits your needs.
For releases we credit the artist/s or performer/s as on the packaging. So this can obviously be different across releases - some CD’s might credit Snoop Dogg for the track, some might not, so it is correct that Snoop Dogg should not be credited everywhere.
However when it comes to the recording information (recordings represent the musical recording itself, which, as you’ve found, can be linked across multiple releases, compilations, etc), we always try to attach full and actual credits regardless of what releases say. So Snoop Dogg should be credited when you click through to the recording.
As mentioned by Jorgosch, ideally you would know what CD the rip is from. Otherwise you do need to manually scan over what the tagger is doing, and adjust to your personal preference.
If you always want the most complete credits tagged you can start doing stuff with the tagging script that, for instance, sets artists from the recording rather than the release - endless possibilities if you want to go down that rabbit hole
Thanks for your reply. The assumption is that the content is identical, so I think the acoustic fingerprints are identical, too.
Thank you very much for your reply, too. I understand from what you write, that this recording information is not completely transferred to the actual tag by default.
So, are you saying based on your experience that the probability in the mentioned example is way higher that the release handle the credits differently than that the entries in the MusicBrainz database are not 100% identical to the release information in this case?
And manual scan means what I described as follows:
I believe that it is if you enable “Use track relationships” under Options > Options… > Metadata in Picard. See the documentation for more information about the configuration options.
Track credits and recording information are usually the same to be honest, 99% of the time I reckon (not counting classical?), but in this case it definitely seems like some releases handle it differently.
There is definitely also the chance that mistakes have been made when entering in a release or recording! Isn’t it cool though that people can choose to use the most complete credits, or match their release when tagging??
