Picard 2.2.1 / 2.2.2 not working properly

MusicBrainz Picard
1

I recently installed Picard 2.2.1 and immediately found it wasn’t working properly. I am using it solely to grab acoustic fingerprints and register them with the corresponding recordings in MusicBrainz. I have been doing this for years. Now when it calculates the fingerprints, the process seems to run normally, but the result is that no AcoustID shows up in the track’s tag browser window. I can still drag and drop the file onto the corresponding recording in the MusicBrainz browser window, and again everything behaves normally, and the recording gets a “green flag”. Finally, if I then click the “Submit AcoustIDs”, the process again runs normally with the message that it was submitted successfully. But no fingerprints show up in MusicBrainz. I upgraded to Picard 2.2.2 but the problem persists. Any ideas?

2

The AcoustId server has some issues in the last days, please see the following discussion:

5 Likes
3

Oh, OK. Thanks for that.

4

This problem is back again. I’m not sure it has anything to do with the AcoustID web site, because I can access that just fine.

A key symptom is that when I hit the SCAN button to scan the selected tracks to take their fingerprints, the process seems to proceed just fine, and completes with no reported errors. The list of scanned tracks turns from grey to black (because they are not yet associated to MB recordings). If I click on one of them, normally in the pane below I will see a list of tags and properties, including the AcoustID value. But now I see nothing at all. These are Apple Lossless files with a complete metadata tag load, plus an additional custom tag that contains a huge amount of custom data. But none of this has been a problem prior to the Picard 2.1.2/2.2.2 upgrade.

Any advice gratefully received.

5

Please see the discussions in the AcoustId category, especially Unable to unlink an AcoustID

If the AcoustId server is misbehaving we can’t do much about this from the Picard side, best is to report this to luks in the AcoustId category.

1 Like
6

Thanks, I will check that out. But there is (I think) an important Picard-only issue here, which is the failure to generate a fingerprint (while failing to report any error or failure condition). This all happens before (as I understand it) there is any need for Picard to communicate with AcoustID.

7

To get the AcoustId you need to query the AcoustId server. The AcoustId is not the fingerprint, you get the AcoustId by submitting the fingerprint to the AcoustId server.

There are basically three cases why you don’t get an AcoustId after scanning:

  1. Calculating the fingerprint with fpcalc fails. This can have various reasons, e.g. I think there are no fingerprints for very short files, or the audio format might not be supported by fpcalc. It can also be a bug in fpcalc. Anyway, if this fails there should be something in the error log.
  2. Looking up the fingerprint from AcoustId failes with an error condition, e.g. because the AcoustId server has trouble. Again Picard will log this.
  3. There is no AcoustId yet for the fingerprint you submitted. This is completely expected and not an error condition. The AcoustId server in this case will process the submitted fingerprint and assign it to an existing or a new AcoustId. In this case retrying Scan later should return the AcoustId.
4 Likes
8

Thanks for the detailed explanation. That makes sense now.