Incorrect album matching -album/compilation instead of album

Hi,

Just started using this app yesterday, and using the scan tool to find songs that don’t have any embedded metadata.
It is correctly finding the song name, artist etc, but it’s finding a completely random album to use for pretty much all the songs. I’ve looked at the link below, where the guy has a similar issue:

From that link it says to use the ‘Preferred Releases’ tab and move the sliders to adjust what type of release type the song will be matched to. I’ve done this, but it’s made no difference at all when I’ve rescanned the songs.
It’s finding album/compilation but I just want it to find the original album that the song was released on, I don’t want the songs to be matched to a compilation release. I’ve maxed out the album slider, moved the compilation all the way to the left, and no difference when rescanning.

Can anybody help me get this sorted? Seems like a great tool to use if I could just get the album matched properly.

Could it be that the original album is simply not in MusicBrainz? You could also try using “lookup” instead of scanning. When you are tagging entire albums, drag the matched tracks back to the left panel, click on “cluster” and then the browser lookup button.

Scanning only works when an audio fingerprint of the recording is attached to the recording in MusicBrainz. If such a connection only exists with a recording on a compilation, that release is loaded instead of the original one, regardless of your settings.

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All the songs are top hits of the last couple of decades, they should be some of the most popular songs out there so I can’t see why the proper albums aren’t being matched.

I’ll try the lookup in browser function.

As @mfmeulenbelt says, the way scan works is that it has to find a matching AcoustID in the database to pull from.
If it finds more than one AcoustID, that’s when the slider settings will take effect to decide which one to use.

There’s a few reasons why this might not be happening for you:

  • Someone has submitted the AcoustID for the compilation but not the release (the recordings can probably be merged in these cases, if we know they’re the same)
  • The album release doesn’t exist (yet)
  • You don’t have the album version of a track, in which case the AcoustID (correctly) only matches a VA compilation or other release that had your version on it

You can check any of these yourself - if you look at a recording on the MusicBrainz website, you can look at the fingerprints tab to see what’s in there. We can’t really help more without some specific examples or albums/ acoustID’s etc!

As a side note, please don’t hit ‘submit’ (submitting your scanned AcoustID’s) unless you’re 100% sure you’re submitting a track from the right release to the right release, including different versions etc, in MB.

What if I do have just the individual track, but want to match it to the original album instead of a compilation – what do I do then?

If you’re having Picard doing the lookup then you can set the preferences in the Preferred Releases section of Options to increase the setting for “Album” and decrease the setting for “Compilation”.

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