Re: [Banshee-List] What is the album-artist issue?

[Jensen Somers <jensen jsomers be>]

Hello,

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 6:14 PM, Michael Martin-Smucker
<mlmartin13 gmail com> wrote:
> I think the bug report for MusicBrainz metadata correction is (*cough* was
> *cough*) this one: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=523423  I just
> closed it yesterday, based on a logical-sounding comment stating that the
> new Last.fm fingerprinting essentially does the same thing.
> As far as I know, though, Picard doesn't use "fingerprinting" to find
> matches.  It just searches through the MusicBrainz database for metadata
> that closely matches your metadata and offers to fill in any gaps that you
> have.  Maybe this feature is still wanted?
> I thought I remembered reading somewhere that using MusicBrainz to fix
> metadata wasn't desirable because of the extra extra load it would put on
> the MusicBrainz servers, but I could be remembering wrong, and since Picard
> is doing it, I don't see why it would be much worse for Banshee to do
> something similar.
> Michael
>

There is a musicbrainz-sharp library which is documented on the
MusicBrainz wiki. It's a wrapper which works with their XML web
service so it should be doable to do two things: check whether the
music can be found on import (either quick or via a scan which I
believe would create some sort of guid but takes longer) and allow you
to add missing music.

Now, if you've ever added an album using their web interface you might
know that's quite complicated. Each artist has to link to an existing
artist in their database and if it doesn't exist yet it has to be
created. On their website they have a lot of auto completion or
correction facilities after you've added something. For example, the
correct name of Run-D.M.C. is Run-D.M.C. but if you type Run DMC it
would auto suggest the correct one. To be short, adding a new album
can become quite complicated and to my knowledge that is not part of
Picard. I don't know how Rhythmbox does it but I can assure you
MusicBrainz would not be happy with a lot of incorrect data.

Now, if Banshee would implement the tagging itself and leave the
submission out for now that would already be a major help to me
personally. I might take a look at this myself to see how doable it is
by hijacking the import functionality and tag music on the go.

Also notable is that sometimes the MusicBrainz artist or song name
doesn't always match the one that's listed by Last.fm. Can this pose a
problem?

- Jensen