Lots of albums not pulling metadata

I’ve noticed I have quite a few albums not pulling any info including genre, artist info and album art even though the allmusic database is populated with this information.

One that really surprised me was Cowboy Junkies. The Trinity Session Album shows artwork but does not list any info or genre. Clicking on the artist link brings me to the Cowboy Junkies artist page but there is no info at all.

Another I stumbled across was for the artist “The Helio Sequence”. Allmusic has lots of info including genre, their self titles album pulls no art and does not list any genres, the main artist page lists nothing either.

The new album by rap artist Murs also doesn’t pull any genres though they are listed on AM.

Jim O’Rourke is another big artist and I get no info for him, no genres, etc.

I just found it odd that Roon imported the album and is able to go as far as figuring out the artist and album but doesn’t pull any available info. This is just the tip of the iceberg, I have tons of albums all like this.

I was trying to sell a friend on Roon since he really loves reading about music but he wasn’t all that impressed when half the stuff he clicked on had no info at all.

Something wrong on my end?

Oh no! It definitely sounds like something is amiss here.

I poked around our database just now, and I see genres for this album:

And most of these artist’s albums:

This one, we don’t have genres for yet:

I’m going to check up on that one (both because we should have genres, and because I didn’t realize there was a new Murs album out – thanks!)

Anyway, I’m going to follow up via PM so we can get some more information about your collection. It seems like we should be getting hits on most of these.

Can you also do me one favor? For the Cowboy Junkies album, can you click the little pencil, then select Identify Album and follow the instructions? If your track list is significantly different than what we’re expecting (say, if the Japanese edition has extra tracks, or a different sequence), it’s possible that would mess up our identification process.

Let me know how that goes, and I’ll be touch about getting some more information.

Thanks for the report!

Mike, with regards to the CJ - Trinity Session, it was not being recognized because 3 of the track lengths are a few seconds longer than the version in the database. Once I selected it as being the correct album, it then fixed everything up and only then did it also fill in the artist page, which I found kind of odd.

It’s a very delicate balance here and we’re always tweaking the algorithm based on feedback. If we’re too stringent, we’ll miss matches that seem obvious (which your case may qualify as). On the other other hand, if we’re too loose with identifications, we open ourselves up to false positives and bad identifications, which is way, way worse.

So, we err on the side of being relatively stringent, keeping an eye on user feedback (thanks for the logs!), and giving users the tools the need to help push close matches over the line.

We have a lot more tools in the works to help with this and make the experience way way better, but for now, I definitely recommend using the “unidentified” option in Album Focus (under Inspector, on the far right) and looking for albums that seem like they should be getting hits.

I actually really enjoy searching my collection, finding unidentified albums, and applying matches (don’t laugh), but obviously we’re always working to automate this and make it as accurate as possible. Regardless, thanks again for the feedback @robbbby!

@mike If I could suggest a solution here. Have your algorithm provide a confidence level on the match - “High Confidence Match” and “Low Confidence Match” (or more tiers). I’d much rather validate the low confidence matches then have to do a manual search to fix unrecognized matches. Then the UI could have a flag for albums that were low-confidence matches. This would give you a lot more flexibility in achieving the balance you describe above. And users could choose the the settings if low-confidence matches should be automatically assigned or not.

In my experience with my library, I find that for my unrecognized albums either the first ranked item in the search is correct or none of them are, so it seems like there is some serious optimization to be gained.