I am trying to tag “You and Me Both” by Yazoo, but Picard keeps using Yaz instead of Yazoo even though I am not using English(US) locale. Why does it do so? Neither English(generic) nor English(UK) work but Italian(generic) does.
The alias Yaz->Yazoo is marked English United States (primary). Is that the problem?
Primaries in the alias table override other considerations in Picard.
Therefore I think that the alias is wrong for this band. After all they are a UK band and in Europe they have always been known as Yazoo. The Yaz name should not be primary as it was used on the US only. Right?
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It should be Primary for English (US), but Yazoo should be Primary for English (UK).
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That’s exactly what I see on
https://musicbrainz.org/artist/42922db2-2e80-44b8-9cdf-0b3a6634c124/aliases
I think picard is at fault here.
No, there’s only an English (US) alias there, but no English (UK) one. If after adding that Picard keeps using Yaz, then we’ll need a ticket 
I disagree.
Picard giving more weight to the en_US alias than to the original name in any situation except if you tell it to prefer en_US names is a bug. My computer knows about seventeen different en_XX locales. Do we have to enter an alias for all of them? I don’t think so. en_US should have no bearing on en_GB, en_HK, en_CA, etc.
We can have English aliases without a specific region, right? This is the one that could be the default for all English regions (unless a more specific one exists, of course).
Actually, I think this whole locale-specific aliases mess should be cleaned up some time. My wish (which I think is pretty generic) is to have a preference list of locales, languages, and scripts. Picard would the select the first one it could find in the aliases, and revert to the main name if nothing is found.
I think the expectation is that you’re more likely to prefer the en_US alias if you’re set to English than the original name in, say, Japanese script. Which seems like a somewhat reasonable assumption. The real solution, of course, is to get rid of “original name” and make all the names aliases (or the equivalent option of giving a locale to the original name), but that’s more complicated. That said, the Yazoo alias should actually probably be just English and not English (UK), that’s a good point. Ideally, every artist would have an alias equal to their original name, with the appropriate locale and sortname (which is different from the “main” sortname at least for non-Latin alphabets).
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I am running Picard under Fedora under the Posix locale (not US, not UK nor Italy). I wonder if that’s also part of the problem.
When I said “with both english and english UK locale” I meant changing the setting in Options->Metadata->“Translate artist names to this locale where possible”, just to be clear.
The locale of the UI should have no effect on the alias used.
Confirmed, I tried with the it_IT.utf8 locale but it did not affect the choice of Yaz vs Yazoo.
Only if the original name is actually in Japanese… I can think of some heuristics, that could be used in picard, but that’s really kludging around the issue.
Applied in Edit #38911274 - MusicBrainz
@zuzzurro, can you try if that fixed this problem?
Yes, it does. It looks that with the current schema, even if not really optimal, it’s the quickest and sanest fix.
Thanks. I was going to try this myself when the DB was writeable again but you beat me to that.
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