Perhaps this question has already been answered, I find that when I do a scan some songs will get reported as coming from greatest hit or songs of the 80s as an example instead of the original album and performer for example born in the USA by Bruce Springsteen, is there a plug in or script that I can use to have the program always select the original release? I realize it is scanning and the actual recording may have come from a greatest hits or a live performance, however I would like it to be from the original album. Does anyone know how to do this?
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I find it inconsistent at best… was hoping to use the scan function to correctly find the song…
Do you know of another way? Also is there a way to scan and tag without the album name?
Oops, sorry, I linked to the wrong topic above. That should have been:
When you say “tag without album name”, do you mean that you don’t want the album name in the filename? Or that you need to identify and tag files that have no album name associated with them currently?
actually as strange as this sounds, I was going to use the scanning feature to correctly identify the song name and artist, after that I could run the songs through the lookup feature which would then likely grab the original album based on the correct file name and artist. Hopefully that makes sense?
That’s actually kind of what I want to do as well - I like having the AcoustID to be saved to the file, but Scan does definitely have spotty results. I’ve wound up doing the lookup myself (if I have the disc I use that to get the release and the Disc ID, which is best to do before hitting Scan; if Scan pulled in the proper release group for at least one track, then I use the context menu to find the right release; or finally I search the site myself and use the Tagger button to add it to Picard; but in all cases I drag the scattered recordings to the release manually), but that doesn’t really take advantage of the automation Picard is built for. Then again, it sounds like you might be operating with single tracks more than entire albums, so some of that up there might not work as cleanly for you.
Did you try the “Preferred Release” sliders mentioned in the second topic I linked to? That should help you get the results you’re looking for in one pass.
I’m pretty sure those only work for Lookup and have no effect on Scan – and for different reasons, neither of us can or want to press the former before the latter. Though, @markinhfx, I will say that Lookup should do a fuzzy search, so as long as your files have some sort of attribution in the tags, they don’t have to perfectly match the database in order to get the right album.
Yes I did try the “preferred release” option which helped a bit on lookup but as @WovenTales points out it would be ideal if this worked for the scan function. And I think lookup would work fine with the correct song and artist name which could be achieved through the scan function which is why I was thinking what if did the scan and did not put in the album info and just renamed the song and artist correctly which would allow the lookup with the sliders set to work better?
By the way does anyone know why the log file grows so large?? mine is almost 4GB…
The only issue with scan is that (if our data is correct) it will never match a live recording to the original album version, because it’s looking for the exact same audio.
With lookup if the track name doesn’t have ‘live’ in it, and you clear the album name tag, it should be searching for the original release group as well as all the others.
Actually… I just realised that you probably figured this out!
Yes, doing that and then running it through lookup with the sliders changed should work pretty well!
One note is to please not hit ‘submit’ in picard when using acoustid with these tracks, since you’re not trying to match the technically ‘correct’ track, and it will save incorrect information to MB.
Oh and other note sorry - since you’re working with individual tracks, and you don’t necessarily want them tagged ‘correctly’, I’m not sure if Picard/MB is the best tool for the job. There might be other taggers that are much more basic that do better at just throwing out the original release and nothing else
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Just to be sure, you mean we shouldn’t hit “Submit AcoustIDs” until the rest of the info is correct, right? My impression of “Save” was that it only affects the local file, not the MB database, but I can see it making sense that doing so would call the submit subroutine as well. I don’t think anything in my process would wind up giving bad data, but I want to know if there’s a chance it might so I can pay closer attention if necessary.
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Sorry, I meant ‘submit’ / ‘submit acoustids’! 
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thanks for all the feedback, Part of what is driving this is for example if I want to only play songs from say the 80’s and because the scan has identified the song from say a greatest hits collection that was released in the early 2000’s it will not do what I want… I hope that makes sense?
Unrelated, what about lyrics? the only plug in seems to be limited to 30%
There is an experimental Picard plugin that will associate a Recording with the earliest Release date of any Releases it appears on. So if a Recording appears on a 1979 album, a 1998 CD anthology, and a 2015 iTunes/Amazon/etc. best-of, that plugin should set the “ORIGINALRELEASEDATE” (or whatever the tag is) to 1979, regardless of which of these the Recording is actually from.
Maybe give that a try and see if that works for you? (Of course, you’ll have to use a player that actually understands this tag too. Also, you may have to look into merging some Recordings as well, but that’s a discussion for another topic if you need help with that. :))
I don’t know anything about that plugin. Some players have the ability to fetch lyrics for you, so you may want to look into that. beets also has a more fleshed out lyrics plugin. You can also write your own lyrics plugin and contribute that to Picard—I’m sure others would like such a plugin too. 
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Thank You for the link to the original album plugin!! Much appreciated 
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