As you may know one of Roon major sources is the opensource MusicBrainz database, therefore the better the MusicBrainz database is the better the results you will get with Roon. But Roon themselves are not going to be able to improve that database on their own, but as a community we can do alot ourselves with not so much effort.
Warning I am going to ask for some help on a specific task here, that will benefit all users of MusicBrainz and tools such that use MusicBrainz.
MusicBrainz tagging tools make extensive use of Acoustid to audio fingerprint songs, if the fingerprint is already in the Acoustid database we can then get metadata for the song. Hopefully this will include a link to a MusicBrainz recording id and then we can make use of the data provided by MusicBrainz, otherwise Acoustid only provides us with basic artist, title, and album names.
Acoustid/MusicBrainz pairings are submitted to Acoustid by users via various programs, each time a particular pairing is submitted its Sources count is increased. This includes SongKong but mostly by the dedicated the fingerprinter tool tool provided by Acoustid.
Usually an Acoustid links to one MusicBrainz recording, but sometimes it can link to multiple MusicBrainz recordings. These may be different MusicBrainz Recordings that are actually the same song or they may be for a completely different song.
It is valid but not that common for one Acoustid to match completely different songs but sometimes applications submit incorrect pairings. This is fairly obvious when you look at an Acoustid page because the valid links will have similar titles and high source count, whereas the invalid ones will match to completely different title and have a source count of one, and the track length maybe completely different to the fingerprint length.
I wish Acoustid filtered these out but it does not so they have to be manually disabled, to aid in this I have created a number of reports identifying the most likely bad pairs.
The first report shows pairs whereby the bad match only has one source and the track it links to is incorrect length for the fingerprint it is matched to, so in almost all cases this match can be disabled.
I have disabled many pairs already but would love some help from others to clear this list, I regenerate the report every day to remove pairs that have been disabled
Procedure is as follows
- Create free account on Acoustid - easiest to use MusicBrainz account if have one.
- Choose an artist in the report
- Click on link in Acoustid column
- Find the bad link and select Disable if it looks bad
- Comment can be left blank and select Submit
An example
First item in the list has a fingerprint of 02:49, and has a good match (within 5 seconds of fingerprint is acceptable) to the song if you want me to by $wingin’ Utter$, and that pairing has been submitted 29 times. In contrast it also has a match to a completely different song hopeless vows by same artist (virtually impossible for two songs by same artist to end up with same acoustid), but it has only be submitted once, and the recording linked to is only of length 01:48, over a minute out
Click on the link and it is clearly wrong
so just select Disable and then Submit to disable it, (you can enter a comment, but not really necessary since it is not displayed anywhere anyway)
and now the row is shown as disabled
If you make a mistake you can click on the Enable button to renable it.
The procedure is quick with no typing required only a few button clicks and some basic data analysis skills, if I could get a few of you just to spend half an hour on this I think we could clear it in no time !