Fix Songs uses MusicBrainz , Discogs and AcoustId for song identification, and by default it uses all of these.
If we have a Melco license it can also use existing Naim Wav metadata files but this is a special case. It only applies to customers with a Melco license who files identified using a Naim server such as a Unitiserve and ripped their music to Wav format, so we will discuss this later on.
MusicBrainz
This is the Gold Standard , metadata is rarely wrong and frequently very detailed. Once songs have been matched to a MusicBrainz album it also makes it very easy to lookup additional databases by the MusicBrainz identifiers* , since this has become the defacto standard used by many music providers and applications such as Spotify and Roon.
So for example we can look up artwork from the Cover Art Archive and acoustic analysis from AcousticBrainz
We can also frequently lookup Artist and Albums pages from Wikipedia and Discogs…
Discogs
Discogs is a database that concentrates on physical releases (such as CD’s/Vinyl) since it allows people to buy and sales records.
When we have matched to a MusicBrainz album then we often have a direct link to an equivalent Discogs release, and this is very useful because Discogs often has additional information that MusicBrainz does not have. And this includes Cover Art so now we have another source for that all important front cover art.
But we can also search Discogs when we do not have a MusicBrainz match. Although there is much overlap, MusicBrainz has albums that are not in Discogs, and Discogs has albums that are not in MusicBrainz. In fact the Discogs database is larger than MusicBrainz so it is very important to have this second database.
AcoustId
AcoustId creates an audio fingerprint of your songs, this then allows the song to be looked up in the AcoustId database, and the AcoustId database often has a link from an AcoustId to a MusicBrainz Recording Id - so in that way we match songs to MusicBrainz.
So the primary use of AcoustId is to help to match our songs to MusicBrainz, AcoustIds are used in conjunction with existing metadata and folder structure to find the correct match.
But AcoustId database is larger than both MusicBrainz and Discogs . So it can very usefully be used to add basic metadata for songs that could not be found in MusicBrainz or Discogs.
Albunack
Rather than access these databases directly copies are stored in our own Albunack database. The advantage of this is it has been designed just for SongKong and Jaikoz so it:
- Is faster than using the separate databases
- More reliable because api cannot suddenly be modified by external company
- More reliable because automatically starts new servers as required to cope with demand
- Better metadata because additional links between the databases that are not in the original databases