SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

Force onto Album / Forced Manual Clustering (for cluster not in MBz)

#1

Well, I just ran into my first big mess. Working backward through our CDs I came upon a “ZZ Top” Greatest Hits album. What a Music Brainz Mess!

It came up on 10 albums and clustering didn’t do anything because the Music Brainz data does not contain entries for most of the tracks on this greatest hits album. In fact, only one track ended up on the correct “Greatest Hits” album. I know some would prefer tracks to show up on their original album in the tags, but I don’t. I want the track to show up on the physical album I ripped it from. I probably already have the other albums, some, or most of them. When I look at my music in a viewer, I might see three copies of Gun Love, one from “ZZ Top”, one from “Viva Las Vegas”, and one from “Greatest Hits”. All the same. That’s fine.

So… Now I fixed this one. I had to do a lot of cut and paste. First part was not too bad, mass copy and paste in the table view. But when it came to the other stuff, MBz tags and such-like, lots of clicking-clicking-clicking… I’m hoping I wasn’t being stupid… I looked all over the place for a way to click on a track and then say “force onto album” and have it give me a list of the albums in my other 17 tracks and let me force this track (and even better a bunch of tracks) onto the album information of another track.

Did I miss a good way to do this?

Michael

#2

There is a better way (although it needs further simpilfication)

Display the ‘MB Release Id’ column
Copy the ‘MB Release Id’ value for the correct track into the other songs
Delete the ‘MB unique Id’ value for the other songs
Run ‘Update Tags from Musicbrainz’ for these songs

Because there is no MB Unique Id but there is a MB Release id then Jaikoz will try to match the songs to the release based on their track length, hopefuly it will match them up and then update the metadata

#3

OK. Definitely wouldn’t have thought of that on my own (lol!), but it does make sense. I’ll try it on the next heinous greatest hits (they seem to be the problem children)…

Michael

#4

Tried that, worked sorta…

What happened is that some of the info was brought over, but I think the problem is that the MusicBrainz data is such a mess on some things, that there simply is no way to fix it from MusicBrainz.

This particular issue, “Classic Yes” a remastered compilation has been (apparently from my hours of digging around online) put out several times, but unfortunately, the two first releases, the releases that should be up front, aren’t really represented at MusicBrainz and the 1 or two tracks that are up there have almost all wrong info (wrong country, barcode with missing digits, etc…).

So the real gist of it is that I have to enter everything manually. So, adding fields to the list view helps, but really, when it comes down to it, there are a lot of fields that are the same on an album. It would be wonderful if there were some way to select a few tracks and say “force onto album” thereby being given a list of all tracks not selected and upon choosing one, all the info that is album specific would be made same between them.

That brings up an issue, I’ve tried all sorts of ways to select just a few tracks and perform an operation on them, such as get lyrics, or some-such. It always does it for all the tracks anyway. Is this something that has to be done with filters?

#5

So how many did work ?

Your idea is something I may well do, but the question is do the songs really exist on the Musicrainz release you are trying to shoehorn them into or should you be adding the actual release into Musicbrainz (which you can do from the Musicbrainz website). Because I don’t think its a good idea to let you allocate a song to an album that it really isnt, i.e your song is 3:41 seconds but the one on Musicbrainz is only 3:20 seconds then its a different song. Is the issue that the songs do not have the lengths entered in Musicbrainz ?

If you right click on song and select View Online/View this Album on Musicbrainz you can check this and enter the songs length yourself manually, then the method I described would probably give good results.

Just bring up context menu (right click) and select from there , that will apply the task to only the selected songs.

#6

Well, out of 3 CDs that had problems, your trick worked on one of them, so it’s definitely helpful.

I see what you are saying and maybe updating MusicBrainz is the way to go. I’ll look into that.

What I was suggesting was being able to enter all the real data onto one track from the CD itself (and perhaps some research into it online) then forcing all the other tracks to match it. Once everything was correct to the CD, I presumed it could be submitted to MusicBrainz via Jaikoz, but maybe I misunderstand the submission feature.

OTOH, I can also see now that you pointed it out, that such a feature could be abused in that it might make it too easy to pick a track you like in what you got back and shove all the other tracks onto it even if it’s wrong. Course you’re only hurting yourself, but still, poluted data has a way of finding its way into the most inappropriate places…

I’m pretty much a purest to a fault about info in my tags. Today I tagged a CD and everything was correct from MusicBrainz except the barcode on the CD didn’t match the barcode from MBz. I corrected it in my tags, but felt funny about it because it is a discrepancy I can’t explain. Is the other one right too but a different pressing of the same release, or did someone type in the wrong one (it was completely different), hard to say and hard to draw the line at where to stop trying to make things perfect (ask my wife, she thinks it’s easy and I’m always so far over the line that you’d think she has to come get me in a car sometimes :roll:  ).

Michael

#7

At the moment Musicbrainz only allows you to enter manually to ensure good quality data, although they sometimes dump in new data from reliable 3rd party data sources, and in the future I think some automatic submission wil be available.

Within Jaikoz you can only link MuscIP ids with Musicbrainz Ids as I explained in another post to you.

I think you sound an ideal candidate for editing data in Musicbrainz. For example you should be able to determine whether the barcode was entered incorrectly and fix it, or whether its a diffeent release once you go onto the Musicbrainz website and take a look. I would recommend specning a bit of time on the Musicbrainz website I think you’ll be impressed.