Hallo 
I started using Musicbrainz Picard to update my metatags. Now I have the following:
I have a file called ACDC - Highway to Hell (original).mp3
In my metatags I have
title: Highway to hell (original)
composer: ACDC
Album: Highway to hell
So actually it is very obvious. I used the lookup (where, for my understanding, the existing tags are used).
In addition, I looked up 200 files at once, all from the same band.
But look what Picard gives:
Why does it think it would be this song?
How did you get the data? Did you use the Scan or the Lookup button? Did you do this on a single file or a cluster of files?
@outsidecontext
I used the lookup method and I looked up ~200 files from ACDC.
Does the latter make difference?
Looks like the MB search is very sensitive to the spelling of “AC/DC” vs “ACDC”. Compare these two searches:
track:(Highway to Hell (original)) artist:(ACDC) release:(Highway to hell) qdur:(104)
vs.
track:(Highway to Hell (original)) artist:(AC/DC) release:(Highway to hell) qdur:(104)
Not sure why this is so. “ACDC” is also set as a search hint for the artist AC/DC
@yvanzo any idea?
Some experiments in the similar search functions of Picard:
(I loaded an untagged folder, and then right clicked on the cluster node and selected “Search for similar albums…” and then edited the search terms to make it an artist-only search)
The URL for the API search is: https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release?limit=50&query=artist%3A%28acdc%29
Clicking the Search in Browser button gives the web search equivalents:
So my guess is that using the artist:(name) search term does not check for aliases. However the Indexed Search Syntax documentation page says that you can use alias:(name) to do an alias search, however:
Moreover, here is the alias search for “AC/DC” which is even weirder:
So, it seems to me that:
alias indexed search doesn’t work; andalias rather than artist (perhaps an option?)The difference might be due to / being a special character that should be escaped.
See org.apache.lucene.queryparser.classic (Lucene 7.7.2 API)
That’s something Picard needs to handle then. I’ll check this.
@yvanzo no, actually I think you misunderstood. The query with the slash gives good results.
The question is rather why searching with “ACDC” does not work, even though there is a matching alias. Like Sophist wrote above.
No - the issue is nothing to do with a Lucene search for artist not using aliases. I think this is by-design because there is an alternative search explicitly for alias.
But that search for alias is broken - indeed, it appears completely broken.
If the search using alias was working, then Picard could switch to searching using that rather than artist.
Alternatively, Picard needs to switch away from the Lucene Indexed search API and instead switch to the standard web search which uses aliases as standard.
The alias field only searches aliases attached to the entity, not to artists in the entity’s artist credit. Unfortunately you’re right that artist also only looks at the AC name, not any aliases.
So - searching for artists using Lucene and recognising aliases is simply not possible?
Can this be added?
Hmm - I guess I partly misunderstood the Indexed Search Syntax page as regards alias.
It looks like we either need to include aliases in the Lucene setup for Releases and Release Groups or Recordings, or we need to setup an artistalias index for these objects that does this.
Yes, as @Bitmap and @Sophist mentioned it, the recording search doesn’t handle artist aliases. Only the artist search is taking artist aliases into account, for now.
That is obviously something to reconsider in the longer term, especially in the perspective of replacing artist names with aliases.
I guess we shouldn’t hold our breath here since MBS-7830 has now been open for more than 10 years without action.
To be clear, indexing artist aliases for recordings/releases doesn’t depend on MBS-7830 at all, it was just mentioned for context.