Jaikoz Song Only Matching

Previous Method

Jaikoz always attempts to group song that belong to one album to one album. If it cannot achieve this the the songs remain unchanged, you can override this by disabling the Only Allow match if all songs in grouping match to one album
option.

But then this can cause a grouping of songs that do actually represent one album to be split up if the album simply does not exist in MusicBrainz yet.

Song Only Matching

Song Only Matching works differently. If Jaikoz fails in its attempt to match a group of songs to an album it then just attempts to match the songs via AcoustId. Having found a match it add song details such as Title, Artist and MB Recording Id but not album details such as Track No and MB Release Id .

We can add some album information

But its a bit cleverer then that. Firstly when an AcoustId is linked to some MusicBrainz Recordings, we look at the MB Releases that these recordings are linked to. And if the groups of songs have recordings that have links to the same MB Release then we also add some basic release information such as Album Name, Catalogue No and Cover Art using the most popular releases for the songs. So for each song we use the most popular release that the song is linked to.

And we know that Cover Artist a key piece of metadata customers like to have. And it is much easier to remove an incorrect piece of artwork then manually search and add artwork yourself.

We do not add MusicBrainz Release Ids

Because we are not sure if this is the correct album we do not add any MusicBrainz Ids that affect MusicBrainz released based tasks, so we don't add MusicBrainz ReleaseGroup Id, MusicBrainz Release Id or MusicBrainz Track Id
 

We do not replace existing album data

But we only add this additional information if these fields are currently blank for your songs, so we don't overwrite your existing data as we cannot be sure its 100% correct. 

We do not use Compilation album data

And we only add album data for albums that are not compilations. The reasoning behind this is that we cannot be sure we have the correct album because we cannot match all songs to the album, but if it is an original album there is a good chance it is the correct one, or a variation of the correct one. But if it a compilation then because popular songs can find their way onto many compilations there is a good chance that this is actually the wrong one.

We can use User Submitted Metadata 

There are many tracks in AcoustId database that we cannot find in MusicBrainz, there are currently 45 million unique recordings in Acoustid compared to 20 million in MusicBrainz.

 

In these cases we can at least make use of the basic user submitted metadata provided by Acoustid. This allows us to add artist, song title and sometimes album for these songs. For album we try use metadata from original albums that rather than compilations.

All these features of Song Only Matching should ensure that Jaikoz can at least partially identify almost all your songs without requiring modification to the default settings.