Scans producing totally incorrect results

Hey guys! I just started using this program yesterday and I’m hoping to get some guidance. I’m a mobile DJ and a decent chunk of my library that I utilize often is this large collection of Billboard Top Hits I received a download code for at a promo event a few years ago. It’s the top hits from every decade since 1947, so it’s a few thousand songs. The problem is the artist and song title are both listed as the song title for every single song. For example, “In My Head” by Jason Derulo is “Jason Derulo - In My Head” by Billboard Top Artists and the genre is Billboard Top Hits. This makes it hard for me to keep things organized with my other stuff.

I got MB Picard hoping to just scan it all in chunks and have it updated automatically. I made a copy of just one of the album folders to test it and scanned it through, but things didn’t go as planned. Initially, everything showed up as stuff from other promo albums/collections (most of them said “promo” in the title). I adjusted the sliders in the preferred results section to only favor albums, EPs, and Singles. I ran “In My Head” through as a test and it gave me results from an 80s album of some group I’ve never heard of.

I did the lookup option, which didn’t seem to do anything. I did the Lookup in browser option, which produced thousands of results. I manually searched for the song by the artist and it came up with the results. I tagged the info and it updated the track. I’m thinking there must be something I’m missing here because with as much praise as this program gets, I’d think it should be able to do this via scan if I get whatever settings right. These are all the most popular songs from each year, so they should be easily recognizable and I’ve seen the data is there in the database. I mostly just care about separating the song and artist name into their appropriate sections and entering the correct genre, so I don’t want to spend all this time searching for each of these songs individually, as it’d be faster for me to manually change it with a tag editing program.

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Hopefully someone will turn up with a “one step” solution.
Soon.

Failing that I’d try editing the tags of one of the folders in something like MP3tag, and so get song titles and song artist tags correct - which should be very quick and easy.

And then if I wanted more metadata/Cover Art, feed the newly tagged songs back into Picard.

Though even then if a Recording is very popular there will likely be many Releases that contain it - and some decision about which Release to use will be made.

Was this something that could possibly be considered a proper MusicBrainz Release? If so, the best way forward would probably be to add it (possibly using something like the Picard plugin “Add Cluster As Release” to help, if they have proper numbering), and then simply using this newly created release to tag them against.

It may sound a bit cumbersome, but on the other hand it means means you won’t have to repeat it in the future if you need to redo tags, and it means anyone else who happen to have also received that promo release (if it really is such) will also not need to go through the effort of this. :slight_smile:

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Scan: Scans the actual music files and tries to match the audio with the track in our database. It ignores tags (so not getting the same album as you want is not unexpected, if the track is on a lot of albums). It also relies on people submitting AcoustID’s and linking them to the correct track - it obviously should not match to a completely different song by another artist. That is user data entry error, and users who find the error can unlink the AcoustID.

Lookup: Scans the database using the track tags - eg it looks for the matching track/ album/ artist tags in the database. So that largely depends on the quality of the existing tags you have. If you have no tags it’s not going to do much.

In the perfect world the entire download (of all the files you have) would be on MB as a release and then you would just have to match the whole folder of music to the release once and Picard would do the rest. You can always add it to the database to help future users but it does involve time and effort.

Picard/MusicBrainz is often overkill if all you want is very basic tags. I haven’t used anything else but others might have suggestions. That said, Scan should give you the right song and artist for 95% of the tracks, and then you can hit save - and then strip out the album tags etc if you don’t care about them.

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You want to make use of mp3tag.de and the MP3 tagger they have. It can take your current tags and filenam and retag them to a different pattern. As your titles are currently “artist - title” you can shuffle this data to the correct tags in bulk using MP3tag.

If you put up an example set of tags from one of your files, and the example file name, I’ll help make a MP3Tag rule for you to get that retagging cleaner.

Once shuffled across to the more natural artist and title tags, then would be time to bring in Picard to make more complete tags.

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Happening to me too. Very annoying.

I’m happy to do some of that work for the database but the actual database forms on the website are going to cause a lot of wasted time when my tags are perfect for some singles (from the vinyl - which isn’t yet in MB with much earlier year tags than some greatest hits CD released decades later)…

If your existing tags are pretty accurate already don’t use scan (audio fingerprinting), use lookup (search by metadata). Use scan if your existing tags are not good or if lookup does not yield the desired results.

Also if using scan try using the new Picard 2.3 beta. There have been some improvements to matching to the results of scan.

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The group of Billboard yearly chart topper songs that is being worked on in this thread may be strongly related to the group of songs being worked on in thread:
Is there a way to deny MusicBrainz Picard the ability to put anything, and I mean anything, into a compilation album?

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If you steer your ship :ship: onto the high seas :ocean: of dodgy :pirate_flag: downloads you’ll find many compilations being made up by regular pirate uploaders.

These compilations are so common it is almost worth considering some form of category for them at MB. They are being “released” to an audience for distribution. And that audience is coming here to get better data on these “releases”.

I have seen number of mega compilations being added to MB that are clearly hand rolled. But what to call them? They are not “bootlegs”, and certainly not “official”. In some ways they are glorified playlists - but the tracks are included. There is an obvious ban on personal mix CDs, but these “releases” are being distributed to a wide audience.

Some related threads concerning those kind of “bootlegs”:


Like one of these?

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Yeah, that’s the kinda thing. Unique packages made by fans and then shared. Though today I was more thinking of the collections of lots of artists like this Billboard example of the OP.

Haha - just looked at that bananananaramamama Bootleg edit notes. I assume you realised you picked one out that I had already jumped into to try and help sort it out? :smiley: That was one of many that were uploaded by the same person and I waded in and fixed some of the mess caused…

Sometimes I forget how much time I spend in this place. :crazy_face:

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