i’v included a link to a screenshot of my issue to better illustrate what my question is
so i know that there are different versions of the same album but isn’t there a setting within musicbrainz that can select the most commonly used album/most popular so i don’t have to go back and double check everything and most of the time, make adjustments? kinda defeats the purpose of automating the process. i know its wishful thinking to assume MBP can always pick the best choice every time but you’d think if the same album is listed 4 different times then it would combine them into the same one, am i doing something wrong?
If you are just whacking a heap of untagged files through a SCAN then AcoustID is going to not really know what to pick. So it takes a best guess. It can get patchy with things that are also on a compilation.
LOOKUP will read your tags and should stick together a bit better.
This is kinda why a bulk scan of thousands of files is technically possible, but leads to troubles like this. Human eyes really do need to check the results.
Maybe try selecting the country bias? Also the mediums?
I don’t know how much that helps, but should help narrow things down. Especially if you are just after some quick tags and not an exact album. Looking at your music I’d suggest just select United States in there and see how it goes.
Make sure you move those Release Type sliders around to. Push the compilations down and the albums up. Or push singles higher if you want the singles picked out.
Also - on your example, notice how the highlighted Jimmy Eat World \ Bleed American album has four different variants with different numbers of tracks. Picard really can’t know which you want as tracks are identical on each release.
A tip - did you know you can CLICK+SELECT three of those four albums, then just drag those all back together?
oh i was not aware i could do that, i thought it was one at a time. but as far as how i tag my songs is just like the documentation says, i group (cluster) everything first then take about 100 of those files and hit lookup first, then with the leftovers i do scan. i did read somewhere that it doesn’t do well with random songs and not complete albums which is my case, i only keep the songs i like instead of the entire album and my release types are 100% for album single and ep and 25-50% for everything else. i don’t have anything in preferred country though so i’ll mess with that.
and with the 4 different variants of ‘bleed american’ by jimmy eat world, that is what i was hoping i could have done. have picard pick the most popular of the songs i have and group them into one album but it isn’t the end of the world, i was just hoping to do less work and enjoy music more
The GUI is pretty clever and interactive. So lets you do plenty of drag and drop tricks to put things into the right place. Also watch out for those tracks that have gone to a VARIOUS compilation.
Tweaking the country should help
The database MusicBrainz has no real concept of “popular”, so you just have to tweak around with those sliders to adjust a bias. Then tweak and drag.
The most important step… and a little bit of time and patience sorting this out will pay off
