Better AcoustID matching in Jaikoz 5.4.0

How AcoustID works

When a song is analyzed and the fingerprint is submitted to AcoustID the AcoustID server returns an existing AcoustID if the fingerprint has been submitted before, or if the new fingerprint is so similar to an existing fingerprint - alternatively it allocates a new AcoustID for this fingerprint. When songs are matched to Musicbrainz by Metadata you can submit the fingerprint/MusicBrainz Id pairing to AcoustID and it will link the AcoustIDs to the MusicBrainz recording.

A new Discovery

But I discovered something new about AcoustID this month, a fingerprint can sometimes be associated with multiple AcoustIDs ! But only one AcoustID is a good match , the others are AcoustIDs that better match different but similar fingerprints. When a fingerprint/AcoustID pairing is submitted to AcoustID it is only assigned to the best primary AcoustID.

Fixes in Jaikoz 5.4.0

When Jaikoz was looking up the AcoustID for a fingerprint linked to multiple AcoustID it was actually keeping the worst matching AcoustID rather than the best one, this was usually one that was not linked to a MusicBrainz recording and hence not very useful. This has now been fixed in the new release of Jaikoz and will improve the AcoustID matching that Jaikoz does.

Fixing your AcoustIDs

This means that using earlier versions of Jaikoz you may have songs in your collection with the correct fingerprint but the incorrect AcoustID. Whilst this is not a major issue because the AcoustIDs are only a mechanism used to get matches yo may want to fix as follows:

1. Ensure the AcoustID column is visible in Jaikoz
2. Right click on the header and select Empty Column
3. Run Retrieve AcoustIDs
4. Save any files that have changed

Better artwork matching in Jaikoz 5.3.0

Artwork has been improving steadily in Jaikoz over the last year, especially since the Cover Art Archive was introduced but with hew version of Jaikoz things have got even better.

First some terminology, within MusicBrainz the concept of an Album is represented by a Release Group, then different versions of that release group are known as Releases. A release is the thing that we can actually buy and often varies slightly between countries. So a release group often contains different releases because it is released in different countries with slightly different tracks. Discogs also uses releases and has similar concept of release groups, known as Masters

Until this release Jaikoz checked the matching release for artwork on both the Cover Art Archive, Amazon and Discogs but just for the matching release. But now if we find no match we then check all the releases within the same release group and Discogs masters, artwork is usually the same for all releases within release group but often MusicBrainz does not contain artwork links for every single release in a release group so this change gives a big improvement.

I ran a test over 1000 songs , and matching artwork went up from 782 to 960 !

Full list of changes in this release can be found here