SongKong has always been able to generate Acoustids and use these to lookup recordings in MusicBrainz albums. However the Acoustid database is significantly larger than the MusicBrainz database and there are many Acoustids not linked to MusicBrainz, Acoustid includes its own basic metadata but does not provide a concept of album lookup only single songs can be looked lookup.
But we have now imported the complete Acoustid database into Albunack and now we are now able to analyse the Acoustid database and reconstruct Acoustid albums for Acoustids tracks. We limit this to generating Acoustid Albums for Acoustids not currently linked to any MusicBrainz Ids, and only if we can construct a complete album and we have the basic metadata (artist, title, album title, tracknos) for every track of the album.
If SongKong can match to complete albums rather than individual Acoustid tracks we get better results, and gives us much better coverage of live bootleg albums and self-published albums.
This gives us over 1 million new albums that we did not have before.
It also helps SongKong to match to MusicBrainz in cases where the user has no existing file metadata so cannot do a direct metadata match to MusicBrainz and the MusicBrainz album does exist but does not have any acoustids linked to it so cannot be identified just by using Acoustids. This process works as follows:
- SongKong tries to match to MusicBrainz album, fails because files have no metadata and there is no link from the files AcoustId to MusicBrainz
- SongKong then tries to match to Acoustid Albums and finds a match based on the Acoustids, and can then add the basic metadata (Artist, Album, Album Artist, Title, Track No)
- SongKong then tries again to match to MusicBrainz and now because it has basic metadata it can find a match to MusicBrainz based on the metadata, we can then update details with more detailed metadata from MusicBrainz