MusicBrainz submission issues

[Optimal-Procedure885]

Thought I’d experiment with MusicBrainz submission to see what it does. I let SongKong seed 10 submissions. Some quick observations:

1. Repeats albumartist when seeding

albumartist is repeated in Artist submission tab as well as Tracklist and Recordings tabs (this was the case for all 10 seedings).

2. As can be seen from snippet above, SK has seeded a submission for a release already in MusicBrainz. I get that there would be times this is valid, but this would to my mind only be the case if the release in question was a re-release that didn’t already exist in MusicBrainz’ database.
   It would be great if there were an option to have SK seed submissions for releases NOT in the MusicBrainz database

[paultaylor]

Its not finding duplicates because of the issue with Artist, also expected behaviour is you would not run this until after you had matched your songs with Fix Songs and therefore that would filter out albums already in MusicBrainz in the first place.

But why is Artist wrong for you, Im not sure because i just tested it here and it worked okay.

[Optimal-Procedure885]

@paultaylor

also expected behaviour is you would not run this until after you had matched your songs with Fix Songs and therefore that would filter out albums already in MusicBrainz in the first place

So I had run the Fix Songs analysis, but I’m running in Lite mode, thus no changes are being saved. I’m carefully looking at what gets added, how the config options etc. behave so I have a very clear understanding of what SK would do if licensed, especially given as I understand it, once licensed it will make the changes on the fly, not asking for confirmation and there’s no way to avoid that?

Does this imply that submissions can only really be made if changes have been saved to the files themselves or does SK leverage its database of the user’s tunes built from the last Fix Songs run associated with that path to figure out what it should/shouldn’t seek to submit?

Triggering submission seems to imply SK is analysing the files again rather than leveraging the outcomes of the Fix Songs process, but I’m sure I must be mistaken because there would on the face of it be no point in doing a second round if Fix Songs has already been run.

Why it’s doubled up on the Artist name I’ve no idea. Wiped the db through the Admin menu, running Fix Songs again… and the outcome is repeatable:

Snippet from MusicBrainz & Discogs tab:

Looking through the Fix Songs spreadsheet it’s clear the album/release wasn’t identified through the Fix Songs process. Tags and the Fix Songs spreadsheet clearly show artist and albumartist us set to “Fred Neil”.

I do have pretty strict matching enabled:

Any any even’t that’s all a detour - it’s clear it’s submitting it because it’s unmatched. Doesn’t explain why it’s repeating the artist name when submitting.

[paultaylor]

Hi, I can’t see the issue, would it be possible to send me the Amy Helm album to see if I can replicate the issue here.

[Optimal-Procedure885]

Done, same as before.

[paultaylor]

Thanks, okay quickly tried it and replicated the issue so that makes much easier to resolve, so busy this morning but later today I will look into why the problem is occurring.

[paultaylor]

So I have found the bug, I wasnt seeing it because it first uses AlbumArtists field if has value (and my files do), then only if empty uses AlbumArtist field. What it is meant to do in that case is look for an exact match Artist match in MusicBrainz and if couldnt find one check if AlbumArtist could refer to multiple artists but it wasnt returning after the first call.

The Issue will be fixed for next release. But if you wanted to try out the functionality then the solution to work round problem would be to copy contents of AlbumArtist to AlbumArtists and Artist to Artists first, and then Add to MusicBrainz Release will work

e.g

Regarding your other questions, the idea is that Add To MusicBrainz would be run after your songs have been matched to MusicBrainz, usually via SongKong, but also could have been done by Jaikoz or Picard. So at this point SongKong is assuming these albums are not in MusicBrainz, and is certainly not relying on a preview task you may or may not have done, it is just using the information currently in the files.

In general the database is just used to allow processing large libraries without requiring large amounts of memory, and for performance so we dont have to go back to the files to read their metadata at each stage. The only exception is the database is required for the Undo task, but other than than you could empty the database after every run without any loss in functionality and just a small loss in performance if reprocessing the same files.

Now if the album is already in MusicBrainz then it should come up as a duplicate on the MusicBrainz Release Duplicates tab as it did in this case

There can be many different versions of a release, not just re-releases, but format and country specific versions ectera. So although it may look like the release is already there we don’t assume it is, we assume that attempts have already been made to match to MusicBrainz and therefore if not matched it probably is not there. It is your responsibility to check yourself before adding a new release to MusicBrainz, the Add to MusicBrainz Release task is just a tool to make things easier and quicker.

I also checked to see if Silver City would be matched by Fix Songs and it was, so if Fix Songs was run first for real then it Add to MusicBrainz Release would try to add it because it would already have MusicBrainz Ids. I don’t have the Fred Neil album so cannot comment on that one.