Continuing the discussion of bad discids, I thought jesus2099 might like this one as he has talked about it a couple of times and I did not truly understand it till a couple of days ago. It does appear that “faulty” software back in the Windows XP days was generating TOC’s for Enhanced CDs with the last track being 2 seconds longer than it should be.
I actually run an app like that on XP in a virtual machine on my Windows 10 box. I keep it around since it is a grandfathered Gracenote media library (no developer or support any longer). I sort of detected the difference earlier when I created this original note, there was something different about my TOC and the isrcsubmit TOC, but was not worried about it at the time.
Two days ago I finished the adding of my collection to the Database and getting RIDs for all my releases and uploading discids and ISRCs. I start running reports on my data and found my 43 discids generated from the TOC’s of the old library program and those generated from my EAC logs were different and they all were Enhanced CD’s. Running more verification’s and outputting a log with both discids and their TOCs showed this to be true.
I had added 10 bad discids, 6 to existing releases, and 4 to new releases I created. Since I track everything I do I knew where those were and removed the 6 “I created” from the existing releases and the 4 releases that I created. for the 4 releases I created I added the correct discid, and for the other 6 the correct discid was already in place “for the release I was using”.
More investigation shows that other releases in the same release groups have the 2 second longer discid. Out of the 43 Enhanced CD’s I have 39 have a combination of both the correct discid and the 2 second longer discid in the database, depending on the release and the release group.
The question is should I do anything about this? Maybe! Is the problem of faulty software gone and a cleanup will fix things or will some of them just get re-added by faulty software still out there? Also can I guarantee that there was not a CD that had a 2 second longer last track whether it was Enhanced or not. I cannot prove conclusively that the discid is bad. Also we we talking about 43 of the albums I know about, not the total that exist.
I am not sure what is more harmful, going through and profiling what we think are bad and removing them, or just leaving them alone knowing that they are there and that they may never get a match to them.
Thoughts? Questions?