Jaikoz appeas to think that Villa-Lobos Bachianas Brasileiras from Musicbrainz (https://musicbrainz.org/release/fae30f16-c406-441c-8277-4f050aa4c2a6) is not a classical wotk.
Why? What criteria are used to set the “Is Classical” check?
How does Jaikoz determine a classical work?
Its quite a complcated algorithm based on scoring each tracks on characteristics such as:
- Known classical composer
- Known classical conductor
- Linked to multi level works
- Instruments usually used in classical works
- Title lookls like a Classical title
- Genre set to Classical
When you say Jaikoz doesnt recognise it as classical I assume you mean it hasnt set the IsClassical field to 1, or do you mean something else?
Exactly - the “Is Classical” toggle is not being set, and none of the “Work”, “Movement” and related fields are bing populated. I did check that Heitor Villa-Lobos and Enrique Batiz are on the composers and conductors list.
Has it actually been matched to the MusicBrainz release, i.e does it have MusicBrainz Ids fields set?
Yes it has. In fact I just entered the MusicBrainz entry myself using Jaikoz!
An attempt to rematch using the explicit MD release ID does not work either.
But I do see that the MB entry is missing “genre”. I’ll add that in and see if it changes anything.
Manually entering the MB Release id without the MB Track Id and Recording Id is not going to register it as a match to MusicBrainz.
So it sounds like for some reason (such as non-matching track lengths) Jaikoz was unable to actually match the songs to MusicBrainz and that is why they do not have the desired Classical fields. If you could run Advanced:Create Support Files I can check this, if you would like to upload the music files and send an email to support@jthink.net I can actually test out your files for you.
Just done that - after two false attempts - use the third.
Thanks actually I recieved the file three times, did it give an error the first two times that made you think it had failed?
So actually I can see the songs are matched to MusicBrainz and for every track it decided it was not a classical track and therefore not marked as a classical release.
But now I have realized you have only just added this release into MusicBrainz so it will not be in the Albunack database used by Jaikoz, you can lookup the release direct from the MusicBrainz database as you have done but the issue with getting it direct from MusicBrainz is we cannot get all the addtional information such as works because it requires many more api calls then when within Albuanck.
This means there is less information to identify it as classical and less metadata will be added.
Also the IsClassical test is done on the release your songs are matched to rather than your songs so I tested the release and like you got it marked as not classical. But interestingly the test that looks at the track artist returns Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Enrique Bátiz ( same as Recording Artist) not Heitor Villa‐Lobos. I expect this is due to the annoying quirk of classical releases guidelines that recording artist and track artist are meant to be different, but there is not an easy way to set them differently when the release is created so have to do an edit later that seems to have been done (so Im not clear why i am still getting the old value)
Now, because the track artist is expected to be the composer the test only expects one artist in the artist credit, and since you have two it fails. If I change the code to check every artist in credit it works, I think there is a bug in Jaikoz because when checking composer may expect only one, but not neccessary to fauil if have more than one and if still contains conductor, orchestra that still points to classical so will raise an issue for this.
In the meantime, you could force it to be classical by temporary setting Identify Classical Albums to All albums treated as Classical, but because for now having to get from MusicBrainz live database will not be able to retrieve all the information that usually can such as Works.
OK, thanks for looking at this. Your account of the workflow is completely accurate, and I am grateful for the explanation. Indeed currently, the only means to set the performers as artists of the recording in MB is to (incorrectly) have them as track artists when creating the recordings, and then correcting this with a subsequent edit.
The long delays waiting for Albunack to update are a serious impediment to me while working through a collection. Is there no way to force an update?
Albunack has recently been updated to 04/01/2026 but we cannot just update it - we have to rebuild it afresh from the latest MusicBrainz/Disocgs/AcoustiD databases each time.
So if you are a user that is actually adding releases to MusicBrainz Albunack is never going to have those new releases immediately, however as you have already demonstrated Jaikoz can get these releases directly from MusicBrainz if you use the Match Songs To Specified MusicBrainz Album option.
But maybe you mean get the updates from MusicBrainz as you make more edits, you can this by doing Advanced:Empty Database first forcing Jaikoz to go back to MusicBrainz to retreive the release rather than getting from our local cache.
The difficulty in your case is that because you are working with classical releases it is missing some work level information so i have raised an issue for this, since only doing this for indivdual releases rather than all releases in lib we can probably tolerate the extra api calls required