It should do, and usually will be unique. But some covers can be pretty spot on identical. Especially if electronic music.
It is one of those areas when I get a bit of doubt when I see a dozen other AcoustIDs added the same and will not touch it. If it is only 1, then it can likely be deleted. If there are a dozen fingerprints, then I’d want to know why.
My usual test is to click through on that cover recording and see if it has other acoustIDs. If it does, then I have a fingerprint to feed into the compare.
It can be tricky when you are in the depths of the bootlegs as you may not have many examples of AcoustIDs for the more rare bootlegs. Often I am working on something with only 3 or 4 fingerprints submitted.
I’ll have to look for more “rule breakers”. By lifting the test to over 5 was a good start for clearing some of these. The higher the gap between numbers of samples the easier it gets. Get to 500 and you are in bot territory.
The problem with bootlegs gets messier when recordings have not been merged. I was working on some Blade Runner bootlegs last month where the same tracks were repeated on multiple bootlegs, but they had different artists attached. Now all of them were correct, it is just how that bootlegger had named it. This meant that before the merge you had three recordings, sharing acoustIDs, sharing names, but different artists. Some of those bootlegs were more common so had a higher count of submissions. This would have led to a case where really they all needed to be merged, but would have looked like a “badly linked cover version” to a script.
Maybe this is a bootleg thing… Let me see if I can find an example in the report where I haven’t already merged the recordings (I am good at finding Edge Cases in any test algorithm… maybe cos I am an Edge Case myself )
No real need as that stands out anyway. When you wade into an artist and already see the first few fixed it gets obvious quite quickly. I am not the only one who has been fixing up Pink Floyd in the last 18 months. Even though there were a LOT in this list, probably over half of them had already been done. It is not just this list that has sent people into Fix the AcoustID sessions.