Sorry to rain on the MusicBrainz Parade, and apologies for one, I’m quite new to the forum (though not to MusicBrainz support), and two, MusicBrainz is so bad I deselect it when looking up metadata.
I won’t write a long post, let’s start here…
Currently using DBPoweramp to tag and rip.
MB continuously provides poor metadata, especially in the Artist department, but others too.
Let’s look at one particular point.
Ripping a Bollywood CD by megastar Asha Bhonsle.
MB has her name as Bhosle. FreeDB, G3, etc all have the correct spelling.
This should not happen because there is no-one called Bhosle.
So why does it happen? How is it possible?
Not acceptable… I think…
While her homepage spells it Bhonsle, her official twitter page, wikipedia (and wikidata), IMDB, VIAF, Discogs, allmusic, etc. all spell her name Bhosle.
I think the issue here is her name is really spelled आशा भोंसले
What we’re probably looking at is the result of different transliteration systems. Like the way the late Libyan dictator’s name was sometimes spelled Khadaffi, and sometime spelled Qadaffi.
Usually we would go with artist intent on which system to use, but she herself is inconsistent, so it looks like the editor just went with the most common.
What is “Not acceptable” is ranting without doing a minimal research.
Variations in artist’s names (especially in case of transliteration) are rather common, this is why MusicBrainz is actually supporting aliases and artist’s credits, and let anyone edit the data.
Nobody is forcing you to use this free and collaborative service, but when using you are supposed to respect a Code of Conduct, and i think your post is rather borderline in this regard.
Can you elaborate on (imho unpolite) “MB continuously provides poor metadata” ? Because your example clearly shows you missed something, as demonstrated by people who took the time to answer to you.
MusicBrainz is a community edited collaborative database; as such both the breadth and depth of the information in the database reflects the users making up the community around this database. Indian users (who are the dominant Bollywood consumers, AFAIK) have only really taken to MusicBrainz in the last ~5 or so years (AFAICT), with programs like Google Code‐in and Google Summer of Code helping a lot to spread awareness.
This also means that while MusicBrainz as a whole has had almost 20 years to accumulate and refine information about music, far most of this music will have been what the predominantly “Western” userbase has listened to/been interested in—and while this does include some Bollywood, it doesn’t include a lot of it. We are seeing more Indian users now (and more “Western” interest in Bollywood as well), so Bollywood‐related music is gaining more attention in the database… but it’s still not at the level of, say, US or UK pop music or European classical music.
