first time post here. I am using MusicBrainz Picard for a while and I am trying to find my way around. The lack of good manual makes things a bit complicated for me.
Nevertheless, I sort of intuitively find my way around in MusicBrainz Picard. Occasionally, when loading a file into MusicBrainz Picard, some tracks don’t seem to be identified. Those are displayed with two connected eighth notes (see screen shot attached).
When looking at those tracks, they see seem to be perfectly normal, no special characters or anything.
Why does this occur, and is there something one can do about it?
The note icon means that there is no file on your computer attached to the track on the release from MusicBrainz. Your screenshot also doesn’t show any unmatched files, so you probably didn’t add the files in question.
By the way, have you tried the documentation here? It’s pretty new but much more extensive than the old documentation.
Thanks for link to the documentation, haven’t seen this one!
Now I understand! The eighth note icon indicates missing files. I got both albums from Blue Note and interestingly when I looked up the Mustang album in Qobuz, indeed, it contains the two missing tracks ‘Gingerbread Boy’ and ‘So I’m Excited by You’. The other album, though, Blackjack, can’t be found (so far) containing the missing track ‘All Members’. Checked it on HDTracks and Qobuz.
One final question: sometimes the tracks identified are marked with a green bar, and sometimes with a green check sign. What’s the difference?
The green bar means that the file has been matched and there is good correlation on the metadata. The green check mark means the file has been saved successfully. See the Status Icons section in the documentation for more information.
Excellent documentation. And there I found all icons explained. Sorry if I asked before reading the manual, but I haven’t found a good one so far till @mfmeulenbelt pointed to this one.
No need to apologize. I didn’t mean to offend. I just wanted to make sure that you had a link to where the information could be found for future reference. Besides, since I’m the one that put the on-line manual together in the first place (largely assembling and editing input from a variety of sources), I’m proud of the effort and take pretty much every opportunity to provide a link.
If you right click the release and go to More Versions, you can check out if there’s versions with more or less tracks, such as with Blackjack. If you click on a 6 track version you will have a complete release:
I haven’t looked further (Discogs is usually a good start) but seems like track 7 as a bonus track for some versions. Mustang is similar but you’re going to have to use the LP version it seems, unless…
…if you bought these from Blue Note directly, and have the time and inclination, it would be useful for other users if you could add the Digital Media versions with the tracks that you got
The lack of a good manual always prevented me from fully using MusicBrainz Picard. I kind of found my way of using it, but only now do I start to grasp its full potential.
I actually downloaded the eight track version of Donald Byrd‘s Mustang from Qobuz. Blackjack is available only as the six track version. Allmusic has the version with the additional track available.
In any case, I need to consult the manual further before taking the courage to upload anything to MusicBrainz‘ database
Another thing that just happened when I tried to identify one of Miles Davis’ albums: Miles
I have all six tracks available, but when loading the album into the cluster pane, it fails to cluster the track ‘There Is No Greater Love’. The track is perfectly file, it’s not corrupted as I it plays perfectly well with any player.
It could be that the left-out file has different metadata from the others, so that Picard doesn’t think it belongs to the same release (cluster).
But maybe you have Picard set up to fingerprint the files and match those fingerprints to recordings on MusicBrainz. In that case the clustering is skipped, and the last file simply doesn’t have a conclusive match with a fingerprint in MusicBrainz, so it isn’t linked to the loaded release.
I looked up the id’s and what MusicBrainz does is to associate five out of six tracks with ‘The Miles Davis Quintet’, whereas the left-out track is associated with ‘The New Miles Davis Quintet’.
This album is usually linked to the album ‘Miles: The New Miles Davis Quintet’, so the left-out track is correctly associated with The New Miles Davis Quintet, whereas the other five tracks have dubious association.
