Album tag from web

[Mythobeast]

I'm currently trying to fill out a bunch of my music collection's albums, and the autotag from web does an amazingly bad job of it, and I'm curious about why. I'm not talking about it not being able to find the songs I'm looking for. I accept that it just won't always do that. Unfortunately, when it does work it seems to find the most obscure possible album that it might have been released on, with titles like Summer of Blah Superhits IX. I would expect it to return the album it was first released on, or some "single" release code.

For instance, when I ask it to find "Longview" by Green Day, it comes up with "1039 / Smoothed Out, Slappy Hours" instead of "Dookie" like I would expect.

Could someone tell me why it does that?

[Lowlander]

Did you check the drop-down for additional results? If more results are found the first one is generally the oldest.

[Mythobeast]

I didn't notice the drop down, but it isn't helping. Another good example:

REM, "Everybody Hurts":
The expected result would be "Automatic For The People". Of the 50+ results , none of them are Automatic For The People. Most of the "Album" results are actually singles with just other songs: "Bang & Blame", "Bittersweet Me", "Strange Currencies", etc.

Rolling Stones, "Paint it Black":
Expected results: "Aftermath", 1966. Of the 800+ results, "Aftermath"'s first appearance was #36 and labeled as being released in 2007. I found later mentions of being released in 2008 and 2006.

This is the old dictionary problem: If I knew which album it was originally released on, I wouldn't have to look it up, right?

[Dreadlau]

I agree. Using amazon auto-tagging when you don't have already the album name in the tag is just a waste of time.
Maybe they could improve that for future versions of Mediamonkey.

[nohitter151]

Try auto-tag from musicbrainz: http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... nz#p175574

[outRIAAge]

I agree with how incomprehensibly-bad Auto-Tag from Web is, like it can't even extract the already-tagged artist and album and use that.
I'm currently ripping CDs using dBPowerAmp, because it does native Apple Lossless rips (MediaMonkey: pretty please?), which just sound better than conversions from Mediamonkey FLAC rips. But then I load the untagged files into Mediamonkey and insert the artist and album manually, and I pick up the track # using autotag from filename.

But when I then attempt Auto-tag from Web... take a mundane, mainstream example: Neil Young's album MIrrorball. Auto-tag from web first searches for "Neil Young mirrorball", then it deletes "mirrorball" and just searches for Neil Young. Then (surprise) it finds "Neil Young - After the Gold Rush".

When I throw that away and explicitly type in "Neil Young - Mirrorball" as the search term, it can't find it, sigh. Auto-tag from web has been exactly like this for several years now. Mediamonkey is so amazing a program that I, a Scotsman fer chrissake, paid MONEY for it, and will again even if this annoying "feature" is never fixed.

[Lowlander]

Did you check the search drop-down? Often several results are returned and you might need to select the correct one. For me nearly all albums are found, although any improvements would always be welcome.

[outRIAAge]

Thanks for your quick response. I checked the dropdown, but there were no other results.

But, an update: I was going to manually tag it from the Amazon listing, and discovered the correct name for the album is "Mirror Ball", so I tagged and renamed the files to match. When I again tried Auto Tag from Web, it used "Neil Young Mirror Ball" as the search string, then truncated it to "Neil Young" and again came up with "After the Goldrush".

BUT: when I manually typed in "Neil Young - Mirror Ball" (including the "-") as the Auto Tag search string, it finally found the correct album. Such are our little victories

I hope people find this useful.

[Lowlander]

PS. You can also locate the album on the Amazon website and use the ASIN number in the Auto-Tag from Web search box. (ex. B000002MZ9)

[Lowlander]

I also tried looking for neil young mirrorball and neil young mirror ball (manual typing as I don't have the album) and it found the correct album on both occasions. I'm using Amazon US.

[outRIAAge]

Using the ASIN # as the search string is a truly helpful, time-saving suggestion - thank you.

[Cruiser]

I'm currently trying to fill out a bunch of my music collection's albums, and the autotag from web does an amazingly bad job of it, and I'm curious about why.

I guess the main reason for the lack of "accuracy" in the results is that the search is for recordings available from Amazon.com, and not a search in a historical music database as such. They have never releases, sometimes with other covers and tracks, and are showing the year of that release, not the year of the first release of the original recording. Nor the first year of the release with that particular cover or track list either.

[gpzbc]

PS. You can also locate the album on the Amazon website and use the ASIN number in the Auto-Tag from Web search box. (ex. B000002MZ9)

Oh, great tip!! I didn't know that!

[gpzbc]

I just figured out the using the ASIN number from Amazon mp3 results in a "No result was found" message every time. It appears that the search excludes Amazon MP3.

Is there any way to have the search include Amazon MP3 as well as Amazon CD format? Lately I have been finding a bit better results on the Amazon MP3 site.

[nohitter151]

I just figured out the using the ASIN number from Amazon mp3 results in a "No result was found" message every time. It appears that the search excludes Amazon MP3.

Is there any way to have the search include Amazon MP3 as well as Amazon CD format? Lately I have been finding a bit better results on the Amazon MP3 site.

There was a discussion about this previously somewhere, and basically the answer is no. The MM devs can't access the amazon mp3 data because Amazon doesn't provide an API to access that info.