Submitting AcoustIDs: scan button greyed out

MusicBrainz Picard
1

I’m looking for some help submitting AcoustIDs using Picard. I’ve added some albums to Picard which don’t have AcoustIDs on MusicBrainz yet. There were enough tags on the files that Picard correctly matched the tracks and they’re on the right hand side of Picard. I’ve looked through the instructions here:

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/AcoustID

but can’t figure out how to get AcoustIDs for the tracks and submit them to MusicBrainz. Both the Scan and Submit buttons are greyed out. This includes when I select albums or tracks.

I’ve added my API key.

I’m using Fedora 25 Linux. I’ve tried without adding any plugins and i’ve tried with two different plugins:
fpcalc from chromaprint-tools-1.2-3.fc25.x86_64.rpm
libchromaprint.so.0 from libchromaprint-1.2-4.fc24.x86_64.rpm
Which of these is correct?

What else do I need to set up to be able to scan and submit AcoustIDs?

2

What you describe makes sense, but currently does not work.

You have to select files that are not yet matched to tracks on the left side in order for the Scan button to work. This will also probably match the files to the wrong release, if so drag the files back to the proper releases.

Picard’s main use case of AcoustId is currently to assist in matching, with submitting the AcoustId being a step afterwards. For the use case of files already matched and you just want to calculate the IDs it is a bit complicated. I agree scanning already matched files should work and just update the AcoustIds for submission.

3 Likes
3

+1. Is there a PICARD ticket for this? I don’t think @zas has frozen 1.4.1 yet, so this could still make it in and save a lot of confusion until 2.0 is released. It isn’t quite the first time this has been brought up. A number of GCI students also had trouble with this at least (we had a couple of GCI tasks which specifically included submitting AcoustIDs). :slight_smile:

Edit: As no one stepped up with a ticket, I filed one:

4 Likes
4

Thanks for the response. I should be a bit clearer. Picard managed to match the files itself, and I went through and made sure they were the right releases myself. (It had a bit of trouble with one album, but that’s a different issue. Oddly, it moved it to the right side anyway. Don’t know what that means.)

My question is about how to get Picard to calculate the AcoustIDs, and then submit them.

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Yes, this is what @outsidecontext explained how to here:

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Suggestions for changing how AcoustID scanning and lookups work

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Thanks for the help!

This doesn’t seem consistent with what Picard is actually doing. The files all automatically go to the right side, even though many of them do not have AcoustIDs in MusicBrainz. There’s nothing left on the left side.

8

Do they already have MusicBrainz IDs in their file tags? There’s an option in Picard to “automatically scan all new files” and “ignore MBIDs when loading new files”. You will want to have at least the second one unticked if you already have MBIDs and don’t want them to be moved to the right-hand side automatically.

2017-02-24-114214_843x527_scrot.png843×527 32.2 KB

Note, however, that you can also drag the tracks from the right-hand side back to the left-hand side, so you can do the scanning.

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Am I missing something here? I got an API-key set and everything.
If the “submit acousticid” button is grey it should be very clear why.

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If scan found the stuff, then there’s nothing to submit - it already knows this matching, that’s why it could find it in the first place :slight_smile:

1 Like
11

Yeah, but it didn’t recognize all of them? I had to drag some of the songs there. Thought I would contribute with the missing acousticID’s after dragging them there but the button is grey and I’m not sure why…
EDIT: another gif:

12

I’m still having some trouble with the process.

I turned on “Ignore MBIDs when loading new files” and I think I submitted an album’s worth of AcoustIDs (although I forgot to check whether they were already there first, and I can’t tell from the history). In this case Picard had found the album itself based on one of the tracks and added it to the right side, and I matched the others by hand.

I then added another album to the right side (by bringing it up on MusicBrainz and clicking the green tagger button), and matched the files by hand. This time I got the error:

AcoustID submission failed with error 'Error downloading http://api.acoustid.org/api/v2/submit -

There’s probably more to the message but it’s not visible.

Am I doing something wrong, or should I just try again later?

I’m also wondering if it’s possible to let Picard do the matching itself and then submit the IDs. It seems like a lot of redundant work to have to turn that feature off and find all the albums, click all the green tagger buttons, and drag the files around for each track. (Is there a more streamlined way to do this? It seems like all the component parts to automating this already exist.)

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If scanning didn’t bring up any results, you can still use any of the available methods for associating files with the correct tracks - lookup, clustering + lookup, tagger buttons and dragging a bunch of tracks at once onto a release or dragging the whole unmatches files section onto a release if there’s only one etc.