[mythtv-users] CD Artist-Title-Track Information Incorrect

[Paul Harrison]

On 27/07/15 19:14, Jim wrote:
>
> This leads me to a couple of questions:
>
> 1) What drove the change from freedb to musicbrainz? Is one expected 
> to be a longer term solution, have a superior database, etc?
>

The metadata from musicbrainz is more consistant than freedb so for 
example artist names are always spelt and punctuated the same for all 
tracks from the same artist. In freedb you can end up with several 
different versions of the same artist name.

The reason is the muiscbrainz database is heavily moderated to keep it 
consistent whereas in freedb there is little or no moderation so you can 
end up with some very bad metadata.

One of the problems as I think you have discovered already with the 
musicbrainz freedb database is there developers have in the past refused 
to use genres in there database. I believe they have now seen sense and 
do now allow genres to be associated with tracks and albums but it does 
mean that many albums have a default genre in their freedb database 
which can mean the first match isn't always the correct one.

> 2) Would switching the URL back to freedb instead of musicbrainz solve 
> the problem I encountered? Or has other code been modified in 
> association with the change to musicbrainz.
>

You just have to switch the url every thing else is the same.

> 3) If musicbrainz needs to be used as the primary source, could freedb 
> also be contacted and its output used to disambiguate when musicbrainz 
> supplies a list of inexact matches?
>

I started to create some python scripts that can be used to get the 
metadata from various sources that would allow users to choose which 
source to use or possibly just fall back to other sources if not found 
etc. but got distracted and never completed them. The UI in the frontend 
would need to be updated to use them anyway.

The method of calculating the discid used as the key to find albums in 
freedb is badly designed and can produce several matches for completely 
different CD's so using the first match that MythMusic does sometimes 
means the wrong metadata is chosen. It would be better to allow the user 
to chose one of the matches if more than one is found.

The long term goal is to use more of the metadata from musicbrainz that 
would allow us to use there cover art database for example or to 
calculate a finger print for existing tracks and use that to find the 
track in the musicbrainz database etc.

Paul H.