Why are records that exist in Music Brainz not recognised by the B2? Any workrounds?

[Bruce Robinson]

I've had my B2 for about a month now and have loaded about 650 discs onto it.  Of those about 10% have not been recognised as being on the database and I've loaded them onto the machine.  Some of those are obscurities and others compilations from many years ago.  However there are also some very well-known albums.  Looking on music brainz, some of these have records in their database.

I know this is a topic that's been discussed before but I've not found a clear answer as to why the B2 does not retrieve these records from music brainz.  Is it something to do with the connection?  Or is there something with the software that's not working correctly?

Here are a couple of examples:

https://musicbrainz.org/taglookup/index?tag-lookup.artist=rollins&tag-lookup.release=way+out+west&tag-lookup.tracknum=&tag-lookup.track=&tag-lookup.duration=&tag-lookup.filename=

https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/b40ef6ed-4d5f-4b33-a023-2ce4410b3f2e

If this is something that is impossible to fix, is there a relatively simple workround? e.g.using Music Brainz' Picard software?

I don't want to have to type in all the information for 10% of my collection when it's already available in the database.

Bruce Robinson

[JFBUK]

Hi Bruce,

Do you have the possibility of ripping your CD's on a PC or Mac ?

If  so, you could rip them there first and then upload to the B2.

This is what I do using Exact Audio Copy (EAC) on a Windows PC.

https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

EAC offers a choice of databases to use including Musicbrainz

There are other ripping tools if EAC does not suit

John

[Daniel Taylor]

I add my support to what John just suggested.  I do 100% of my ripping on my computer using dBpoweramp CD Ripper.  I also use EAC sometimes.  I've had very few of my albums not be recognized by the databases used.  Sometimes I have to tell it to try a different database, but it's very rare that an album cannot be found somewhere.  And I tend to acquire some rather obscure albums.

[Graham Smout]

Its because there a multiple releases of some CD's and each release will have been given a  different identiy code . Apparently it would be impossible to create  a database that catered or all the potential identity codes. I think everyone will have this problem to some extent. If only 10% of your discs are failing to be recognised by Music Brains that's pretty good in my experience!

As the previous contributor said, rip on a PC or Mac and its' likely that the album will be recognised by most ripping programs as they recognise albums in a different way using a different type of database. Either rip as a WAV or a FLAC file then transfer to the B2 from a FAT formated USB drive, or simply use the B2's WEB UI uploader if the PC or MAc is on the same network, Make sure you stick to the file folder protocol ARTIST NAME -> ALBUM NAME-> TRACK NAME.

HOwever if you dont have a PC or a MAC you are stcuk with manually relabelling the album

 Good luck

[Bruce Robinson]

Thanks to you all. There seems to be a consensus on what I should do so I'll follow your advice. I have a windows pc and an external cd drive which I've been using with the B2 so it should be easy. It's a bit disappointing though after the promises of the B2's literature. Oh well...

[fred.w....@gmail.com]

Have your tried updating the CD name database from the B2's front screen?

Fred 

[AJ]

The normal reason that a CD isn’t found by the Brennan when there is a entry in the Musicbrainz database is that the entry in the database does not have a disc id associated with it, unfortunately this is very common.

When the Brennan rips a CD it calculates a disc id based an the total length, number of tracks and individual track lengths. It then uses this disc id to search the Musicbrainz database. If the entry in the database doesn’t have this disc id associated with it then the lookup will fail. 

This method requires that the CD you have has to exactly match the entry in the database. Musicbrainz does support an additional lookup mechanism (fuzzy search) where it can find entries in the database where the track lengths closely match which may find a different release of the CD you have (or a entry with no associated disc id), of course it is also more likely to find entries in the database that have no relationship at all to your CD. 

I don’t believe that Brennan currently implements the fuzzy search method hopefully this is something that can be implemented in the future. However although this would probably significantly improve the likelihood of finding the CD in the database it doesn’t solve everything. There are also entries in the Musicbrainz database that not only don’t have a disc id but also don’t have any information regarding track lengths and therefore it will be impossible to find them these entries automatically. 

There are other mechanisms to search the database, such as a simple text search of album and artist names, but they would need to be implemented. The Musicbrainz database is a very different beast to the old FreeDB/CDDB database. Unfortunately the programming interface to the database only has limited documentation and a fare bit of reverse engineering is required to decode the responses from the database, also these responses can be huge and vary a lot leaving plenty of opportunities for bugs, so this is unlikely to be a insignificant amount of work. 

[Bruce Robinson]

Thanks AJ for your detailed explanation, which I've only just seen.  It answers my question very fully.  It's a shame that there is no explanation in the 'official' material.

 Following the earlier advice, I have been using dbPowerAmp to to search for the missing information and then rip the disc.  I have found that it locates it successfully almost all the time.  I've also only now realised how easy it is potentially to upload the information to the B2 so I will continue to use this for the ones it can't find.

The responses on here have enabled me to solve and understand my problem, for which many thanks.

Bruce