Comment by wink
7 days ago
This is kinda topical for me as I just scanned some barcodes off some CDs and my results were: 90-95% detection rate on MusicBrainz, and for the rest it ranged from "yeah, this is clearly the same thing with 10 tracks" to "oh my, there are 7 different regional versions with 10, 11, 12, 13, 13 tracks and I need to pay attention to grab the correct one so the last 3 songs are not wrong" and "this is some 5 EUR sample from an unknown label and really hard to find. Or their docs are not great, I had wished for something like "artist of track 1 = X and artist of track 2 = Y" that probably would have narrowed it down the most.
When digitising my collection and using MusicBrainz as the main source of metadata, I had to add about 50 albums nobody had entered before. It has a huge amount of stuff - it already had 95% of my collection - but it's not perfect.
The best way to distinguish an album (after barcode or name/artist, and medium) is number of tracks, and if that's not enough, release year/country. I got my metadata by using their Picard tagger and the CD TOC (as it contains the number and lengths of tracks, it's much less ambiguous), but of course opening every case and putting every CD in the drive is a lot more effort than barcode scanning.
You can use the advanced search syntax if you need to look up multiple fields at once. https://musicbrainz.org/search -> Type "Release", method "Indexed search with advanced query syntax"
For example: barcode:075596073820 AND tracks:11 gives https://musicbrainz.org/search?query=barcode%3A075596073820+...
Docs: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Indexed_Search_Syntax