Why are recordings setup as "[standalone recordings]"?

MusicBrainz Picard
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This is my first time using Picard, but I had a bad experience years ago where I used a music file renamed and lost a lot of information and folderization of my files. I have a library of nearly 40,000 in my collection from 1999, and most of them are probably more niche than I’d like.

Issue

I noticed many songs going into the “[standalone recordings]” album even though they’re from albums, and there are a bunch of files in Culters and Unclustered files that are also supposed to be in albums and even have albums listed in their tag data.

Examples

These songs are from an album:
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My files original tag data does have the album:
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Here’s another set of songs listed as a Cluster, but it’s not in an album on the right-side:

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And then there are some red albums saying it couldn’t load the data. What’s that mean? Do I have to manually fix it using the search function?:
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Question

I’m wondering why songs from albums are showing as “[standalone recordings]”, and if it’s possible to fix it or have Picard lookup albums based on the album listed in the original tags or in the file directory they reside.

2

It looks like your files (at least in parts) already have MusicBrainz IDs associated with them. For the ones with the loading error the release they are tagged against probably no longer exists in MB. For the ones getting loaded as stand-alone recording the most likely cause is that they only have recording IDs in the metadata, but no release IDs.

You can check the metadata for existing releases.

The best way to solve both is probably to move the files back to the left side of unmatched files and do a new cluster / lookup.

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One important step before starting a mission like this - backup everything. Buy an external hard drive and make a clone of your whole collection. That way if anything goes wrong you can roll back.

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In the few hours I spent trying to name some of these tonight, I noticed that quite a few don’t exist in MusicBrainz even when I look them up.

Also, quite a few of them had English names and were converted to Japanese characters. That’s bad for me because I can’t read them anymore.

Does Plex translate them? Is there some way to add the original English name back?

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In some cases, there might be an English pseudo-release in the same release group as the Japanese release. If one exists, it should be listed in the “Other Releases” submenu that’s shown when you right-click on a release in the right pane.

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Oh man! So that’s what that right-click menu does. I need to check that again now and see what I can fix because these Japanese characters are really tough to read!

Glad there might be English or Romanji names again!

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That right-click menu totally fixed it! Now I feel a lot better about these renames ;). Not everything has an English version though, but I can potentially add that data myself if I go back to my album snapshots.

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For the ones that don’t have transliterations:

  1. Click the album on the right side.
  2. Right-click the title in the conversion area below and select “Use Original Value”, and it will make all those titles the old ones. You can also do it individually per song.
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I typically have to do it for each song title and the album title when this occurs. The artist names are almost always in English for Japanese works.

This was a big help! I’m now very happy with Picard’s auto-naming of foreign works. :wink:

I went into Plex just to check, and Plex uses the ID3 tags for things like accompanying artists, so you don’t need “feat” in the filename.

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