Comment by JohnFen
2 days ago
MusicBrainz and CDDB have become error-ridden enough that I've essentially stopped bothering with them and have switched back to just entering the information manually.
2 days ago
MusicBrainz and CDDB have become error-ridden enough that I've essentially stopped bothering with them and have switched back to just entering the information manually.
It's worse if you're ripping foreign audio. I got a bunch of discs from Japan which I would assume, being Japan and all, there would be excellent data online. Wrong. Every single album got matched to something else.
Even accurip was incorrect. I pretty much don't trust any of the online data sources anymore and just manually enter meta.
And don't do what I did... don't just lets beets run unattended. What a pain that was.
I was doing audio + metadata ingestion for the major labels and they sent us a truck load of East Asian CDs of different languages, and here's me with a team of poor minimum wage high school grads looking at me all crazy.
Yes, you're right. Also, with obscure or rare CDs. If they're in the databases at all, the odds are better than 50% that the data is incorrect to some degree, or they are confused with completely different albums.
Isn't that still a labor-saving starting point?
7 replies →
your best shout for jp cds is hoping someone added them on discogs
I think about half of the Japanese albums I tag have a mistake of some sort on Discogs, such as wrong okurigana or kanji usage. I've corrected some of them myself, but it happens so often that I've mostly given up. In the end it's faster to transcribe from the back cover.
I just ripped a small collection (only ~200 discs), and I encountered all of the problems that have been complained about in this thread. I still used Musicbrainz, because it was easier for me to double-check and fix the entries in their DB than to manually type all the data myself.
When bandcamp releases were available but nothing was in the database, I found it quick and simple to copy+paste the track listing into MB and create a new release. Combining it with the TOC I'd already been searching for, I got perfect rips every time without much issue.
Even with a significant amount of time double checking and fixing the metadata, I consider it a good use of time. I was not simply ripping my CDs, I was helping maintain the historical record.
There are userscripts to automatically do this from sources like bandcamp: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Guides/Userscripts
> I was not simply ripping my CDs, I was helping maintain the historical record.
That was how I felt about it in the earlier days, when I'd actively participate in updating/correcting the databases. I stopped feeling that way years ago, though. Right or wrong, it felt like a losing battle as so many corrections were never actually adopted.
> Even with a significant amount of time double checking and fixing the metadata, I consider it a good use of time. I was not simply ripping my CDs, I was helping maintain the historical record.
This is the spirit - I've started doing the same for releases that don't appear in MusicBrainz and it feels great knowing that I'm not just doing this for myself.
Was there a period where it was good? I tried in back around 2001 or 2002 and it produced a mess. I swore it off and figured it wouldn’t be around long. Here we are over 20 years later hearing that it’s too error-ridden to use.
These days something like MusicBrainz is effectively a legacy system. So few people buy CDs anymore that there's not a lot of interest in maintaining it. It's fairly hard to even find a computer with an optical disk reader these days, especially if you are looking at laptops.
Note that the scope of the project goes beyond CDs, it's a catalogue for pretty much any format where you can play music.
It's used as the basis in a _lot_ of places. So fixing errors fixes them in a lot of other websites (and infoboxes).
Never worked fine for me, at least not fine enough to trust it.