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

Jim jim_32766 at hotmail.com
Sun Aug 2 16:01:48 UTC 2015



On 07/28/2015 01:57 PM, Paul Harrison wrote:
> 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.
>
>
Thanks for the thorough answer. I can see where the moderated nature of 
musicbrainz holds promise for better metadata. For some reason I am 
achieving better results with freedb with my test case. I've created a 
simple GUI and am using abcde for import as an interim solution.

I like the sounds of a new UI and multi-source metadata. Let me know if 
you ever need someone to help test.

JimC


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