I was interested to see how many release groups have acoustids submitted for at least one version of a release in the release group
1.4M do have acoustids (for at least some track in a linked release)
0.9M do not have acoustids for any tracks in the linked releases, and of these 0.5M have primary type of Album
I don’t know how useful this is but I have created report showing release artist & releasegroup ordered by release artist. I’ve limited it to albums only to cut down the numbers a bit, looking at the results it mainly comprises two groups
Studio albums for unknown artists
Live/Bootleg albums for better known artists (e.g Radiohead albunack)
I’m open to filtering out by secondary types if it would be more useful to only see official studio albums
And wondering if it would be better to just have one row per artist, and then put all the release groups in a line ?
This is top 20 artists for most releasegroups without any acoustids in any release
29714 | Various Artists
676 | [unknown]
446 | Bruce Springsteen
416 | Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band
309 | Peter Alexander
278 | Blank Embrace
268 | Astral & Shit
266 | The Rolling Stones
247 | Daniel Alexander
190 | Dissecting Table
190 | Karel Gott
182 | Heino
176 | Grateful Dead
175 | Ilaiyaraaja
160 | Wilco
157 | Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
150 | The Cherry Blues Project
143 | Hair Stylistics
This result is not that surprising. There are many smaller releases with only a little interest from people. I spend a lot of time in obscure punk albums where there are often no acoustIDs, or only one or two submitted. It is not really a problem as long as the data is correct.
I’ll add albums for releases I do not own just to fill up the discography in an artist. Often I’ll source that from Discogs, but also fan sites and other trusted sources.
Missing acoustids for releases do make it harder for many tools such as SongKong, Picard, Beets etc to identify users music collections. But it is reassuring that the majority of artists in this list are so obscure (at least to me)
Missing data, yes, but it can only be added by someone with the release. And someone who would read this report would probably already have uploaded their albums.
The bonus with obscure albums is their names tend to be more unique. So a normal Picard \ Lookup on track name works well in those cases.
I find it extra satisfying to add a new release, or new AcoustID data to an old release.
Also as I don’t need AcoustID for any purpose myself, usually I don’t add them to the releases I add to MB, unfortunately.
Usually I only add disc ID and ISRC because they don’t require CD ripping.
Sometimes, if I rip the CD, then I will send AcoustID, of course.
And more recently, I’ve been using a Linux PC where I don’t need to rip* to submit AcoustID, so if I add the release while on this PC, I will also submit them.
* I can drag drop CD tracks from Thunar to Picard directly. There is still an issue with that, is that Picard does not know it comes from CD and it scans multiple track files simultaneously, which is not good (I think) for my CD drive. So I tend to not do it any more either.
It’s a convenient feature but you’re only being fooled by the OS there
It just pretends there are wav files on the audio CD while there are actually none. If you try to copy them what happens is in the background it is still ‘ripping’ just the same as any normal ripping software would do, there is no other way to read an audio CD. Well, maybe not quite exactly the same – I haven’t looked deeply into it – most probably it’s done in the fastest possible mode without any error checking.
I know this drag and drop is an on-the-fly rip when the file is scanned.
But if I have to do more than this quick drag and drop from Thunar to Picard on auto-scan, I don’t submit AcoustID.
