Fuzzier matching for Playlist Improver

Suggestion: Allow for fuzzier matching with Playlist Improver, either by ignoring certain fields (i.e., do not account for duration when matching) or making all the fields fuzzier.

Use case: many of my playlists are ancient (30 years!!), and were generated from local MP3s that often differ in duration from the track as it is streaming now. For example, my track might be 2:58 minutes in duration, while the same streaming track in 3:00 minutes. Apart from this, my MP3s generally have the correct track name, album, and artist info.

But this seems to be insufficient for the improver. I suspect that it is the duration mis-match that’s responsible, but perhaps something else too under the hood. In any case, making the Improver use fuzzier matching would be a great help in finding track replacements. Since the Improver requires user approval anyway, there’s no fear that it would replace existing tracks with something completely different. And tracks that do match most precisely would still win over tracks that match less precisely. So it seems like there would not be major down-sides to fuzzier matching.

I didn’t realise MP3 was that old !!

BUT

The MP3 format was developed by researchers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute. While research began in the 1980s, the compression standard was officially patented in Germany in 1989 and released on December 6, 1991. The file extension “.mp3” was officially named later, on July 14, 1995. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Early adopter! (Although I’m probably just shy of actually 30 years with MP3s).