So, I followed the quickstart guide but step 3 does nothing

https://picard.musicbrainz.org/quick-start/

Says I should click cluster, but nothing happens when I click on that…

Here’s my example file: https://www43.zippyshare.com/v/htSOe5cL/file.html

Here’s my fingerprint if it helps: https://acoustid.org/track/00364435-2210-4f13-b303-4593e7f477b4

That’s expected. Cluster only works if you have multiple tracks with the same album value. It will never work on just one track.

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ok, so how would I go about to find the meta data for my file which has an unknown album value (or files as I have more of these unknown that I would like to make known so I know what their title and artist is)then?

You can always use the Lookup and Scan button s described in step 4. and 5. if the quick Start guide. Clustering before is just a general recommendation, as it gives better results for step 4. if you have multiple few that belong to one release (aka album).

In your case that sounds like you don’t have any existing information in your files. If that’s the case “Scan” might be the best option, as it analysis the audio itself. Otherwise the general recommendation is to first try Lookup, and only if this does not give the expected results use Scan.

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Wow, this is a good forum system; you can see in realtime if someone is in the process of replying as if on a live chat with one of your guys but instead of it being a chat, it’s actually a forum! I’ve never seen a forum like this before! I like it!

So I did lookup and it said “No matching tracks above the threshold for file …” and scan says “No matching tracks for file …”

…so what do I do?

The next step is to try “lookup in browser” which will start a search that you can use to link a release back to Picard (using green tagger button). That requires some tags in the file, though. If you really don’t have any info, you’re probably going to have to work by ear at first.

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…so you expect me to listen to all 1,381,612 results (55265 pages) here: https://musicbrainz.org/taglookup?tport=8000&artist=&track=&tracknum=6&duration=261973&release=&filename=006.wav to see which one of those results is my file, if it’s even on there?

And how am I gonna add to your database if I don’t know the meta data myself?! hhahahaha…

EDIT: Looks like your database doesn’t actually store the files but their meta data which means I would have to google their title and artist names and hope a youtuber or other demo streamer website, has it uploaded for public listening…

I’m not going through 1 million + results, do you know how long that will take?! Not to mention I don’t have just the one file, I have like 50k+ to go through as well all of which wants some nice meta data to go with their filenames who have mostly empty meta data like this example file…

Nope, since your file contains absolutely not metadata that search result is pretty useless anyway.

If all your files are in such a bad condition regarding existing metadata, you will have to rely on the “Scan” functionality (which uses AcoustId audio fingerprinting). But not all files will be in the AcoustId database already (as e.g. yout example, if you follow this link you’ll see there is zero information beside the fingerprint itself). I would suggest you try with some more files to see how many you can identify that way, AcoustId in general has pretty good coverage.

For files that have at least some metadata you might have more luck with using lookup or a manual search on the musicbrainz.org.

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I thought the program was like google and covers all and every possible site that may have a trace of the song or track, so kinda like a reverse track searcher, similar to a reverse image searcher, but instead of images, it’s songs, music and or soundtracks… So it’ll look into Groove Music, iTunes, Spotify, Youtube, etc., to find that song title you want and not just limited to your own database or restricted by sufficient meta data…

Edit: Hahahaha, so I went ahead and tried it out on my other unknowns and check this out, it thinks this: Zippyshare.com - [now defunct] Free File Hosting sounds like track #2 of this album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSWlaSCmaiE starts at 03:28 and is called: }0{

That’s basically the goal of acoustID, but it requires that someone add the acoustIDs in the first place, and that they are attached to the correct recording (as you discovered). Your ear and brain are still going to be the best place to start, in the absence of any other data.

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So I did a scan instead of lookup and that seems to be slightly more reliable, as I found out the title is Genitorturers - Public Enemy #1 for that one I posted and the tunes appear to match up right better this time.

So why dont you add the libraries of iTunes, Spotify, Youtube and the likes to your database?

Musicbrainz has a preference of quality over quantity.
While you could bulk add data from spotify or youtube you are going to create more mess.

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I found two titles incorrectly tagged, the already noted on here and another one of different sort…

While you could bulk add data from spotify or youtube you are going to create more mess.

But you would only be using it so that you can find an acoustic match, not by ID but rather the analysis of the soundwaves on the file(using the scan option that scans the file’s soundwave to find matching or almost matching tunes, except it does it silently without it requiring a mic for it to listen to the track to scan it) just like how I could do it on my windows phone nokia lumia 920, as it uses it own library + spotitfy, soundcloud and many others I forgot the names of, but of course microsoft had to decommissioned their music services on that device so I can no longer lookup unknown music/songs through that method… :slightly_frowning_face: