smarter album selection (feature request, or advice request)

[zeiss]

I don’t know if this is a jaikoz comment or a musicbrain comment, to be honest.

I am music-braining a few thousand songs (20 at a time while I learn the process

What I’ve found is that despite playing around with various match settings, many albums returned are obscure compilations. For example, “If I had $1000000” by BNL was matched to the Scrubs Season 2 soundtrack instead of their Gordon album. and GNR’s “Paradise City” matched 40 Greatest Metal Songs instead of Appetite for Destruction. I’d like each album to be the most popular album, one that I’ve heard of, rather than some random one. U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday is attributed to Especial, Volume 1, instead of War.

So I guess my first question is - am I missing anything? I don’t want to request a feature if I am just doing something wrong. I’ll try to attach some screen caps of my settings, in case that helps.

My second question/suggestion would be two ways of solving the above problem otherwise with options.
(1) Rank albums by sales. I assume this is impossible with the MB database (unless it contains sales info). So that might be a MB feature request: somehow rank the popularity of an album, be it by $ or otherwise. There must be databases for that somewhere. I would assume that in most cases, the best selling album is the “main” album.
(2) Rank albums by date. Generally the first release of a song is going to be the “main” release. All subsequent Greatest Hits, soundtracks, Time-Life compilations, by definition, will have a later release date.

Do you think this would be helpful, and feasible? I’m a newbie, so I realize I have zero expertise in this. I’m just thinking aloud.

[zeiss]

here are some screen caps of my settings, as I try to focus on official release albums that match the artist and song title. i realize there will always be weird results occasionally due to misspelled song titles, song titles with or without parentheses, etc. so maybe this is just a fact of life. but if i’m missing something big, please let me know.

[paultaylor]

Hi, Im guessing that the match is only being made based on the Acoustic Id, and the Acoustic id is currently linked only against the track on the obscure release rather than the main releases. Alternatively does the metadata match the album you want or did the metadata match the obscure album Jaikoz will always try to find the best match so if your metadata is for the compilation but you want Jaikoz to match it against the earliest release you’ll need to remove the bad metadata before matching.

Track length is also considered, and only tracks that are within the track length range are returned. Depending on your encoder your track might only be matching the track length on the obscure album. You can remove this restriction by unchecking Preferences/Musicbrainz/Possible matches must be within track duration.