I just scanned The Beatles “The White Album” and saw that it updated my mp3 files to have the album name of “The Beatles”. I have never in my life known this album by that title. I don’t think anyone has. So, I did some research and found that technically, “The White Album” was never named nor given any cover art due to the flack they took for the Sgt. Pepper’s album art and name. So, the album is basically regarded as a self-titled album when cataloged. Never knew that. At any rate, I know if you go and look up The White Album in iTunes, that is what you’ll find. However, after processing my music through Musicbrainz, if I try to search for “The White Album” or even “White Album”, I get no matches.
So, what I was thinking, when albums have such commonly known colloquial names, perhaps there should be a way to capture that in Musicbrainz that translates when the Musicbrainz database is used to update a set of audio files like Picard will do. This could be a setting in Picard (like maybe there is a checkbox that will override the Album Name if Musicbrainz has a Disambiguous value saved for the release group or selected release) or some algorithm for the Musicbrainz API that swaps out the official Release Name for some saved colloquial value?
What do you folks think? Is there value in this discussion? My personal thoughts are there is a way to capture the official name while also allowing the colloquial name to be embedded into the ID3 tags so the album can actually be found in your given music manager and this mechanism could be automatic.
Try to find “The White Album” anywhere on the packaging.
If you have an official edition, you will most probably not find this title.
“The White Album” is a descriptive nickname.
It is quite low in the results but you do find it with a search, thanks to a release group alias.
But in direct search, it comes first.
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There are far too few albums this actually happens with. So it is easier to just manually edit.
See also Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, Peter Gabriel’s first four albums, Seal’s first two…
Actually… now I look, something wrong there. Don’t know how that name sneaked into Led Zeppelin’s Thought that was against the guidelines, but you are allowed to do it with tracks ( Style / Unknown and untitled / Special purpose track title - MusicBrainz ) So not sure why it is not allowed for albums…
I tend to agree with Ivan here. I haven’t seen it too often, so I’d say manually editing the tags if you’d prefer a different title. in my particular case, out of almost 1,500 albums in my collection, I can only think of less than 8 albums where this would apply.
another couple examples would be Weezer, who are up to 6 self titled releases, and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.
(edit: I forgot about Brouillard. all their albums and tracks are self-titled)
a bit off-topic, but looking through the Release Group edits for [Led Zeppelin IV] is kinda hilarious, with all the times people have tried removing the brackets… 
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There are many albums without titles, equivalent to say the title is the artist name.
Most debut albums were like that. And, in the past (for French chanson, at least), it used to happen for many more albums than the debut album.
Because with tracks it’s when we know the actual title of the song.
But for albums, “The Fourth Album” and “The White Album” are not the actual titles of these albums.
They are what the public came with, not what the artists intended.
And also, in France we say “l’album blanc”.
We don’t say “the white album”.
It’s just a description.
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I suppose it might be possible to write a Picard plugin and use it to add all release group aliases to the comment field… this could also help for albums with special characters like 4×4=12 by deadmau5, that way it’s findable in a media player with “4x4=12” (note the letter “x” instead of the multiplication sign “×”) or albums in different scripts like ぺこらんだむぶれいん! (PEKORANDOMBRAIN in Latin script)
if someone does pick up this plugin idea, filtering by locale would probably be an important feature to add