Album Name Gobbler - A Discussion of Ideas

[das Monkey]

We have great scripts for getting album art if you know the album name and artist name. But what if you don't know the album name? What if you have the song name and the artist name, but don't know what album it came from, or at least the first album on which the song was released? Well, you look it up. Between Wikipedia and Amazon.com, it's not hard to find this information. But what if you have thousands of loose songs accumulated over the years without any reference to their albums? Look them up one at a time? That's no fun.

So, my first question. Is there a script that already performs this task, namely finding the album name from a song/artist combo?

If so, where's the link?

If not, I'll be happy to write one, but I could certainly use some help from people who've been searching for music data longer than I have (barely a couple of weeks).

With some clever "gobbling", I think I can work my way through last.fm to get a list of albums containing a track by an artist, but it's not the easiest of tasks and will take some time. Still, it's a start.

My question to those of you who know this stuff: are there other consistent resources that work towards this goal -- either a way to directly find an album from song/artist or a way to easily get all the track listings of all the albums for a specific artist?

Thanks,

das

[Teknojnky]

IMO musicbrainz tagger is the best option for figuring out album names from tracks which don't have album data.

[das Monkey]

Thanks! I'd never even heard of that site.

Unfortunately, I just tested the two main apps, Picard and Magic MP3 Tagger, and both of them give some sketchy results, finding compilation albums, movie soundtracks, and greatest hit collections instead of the original source material. Ideally, they should find all the albums where a track is present and then sort by date and allow a selection. I couldn't find any advanced options to allow me to specify logic behind which album is returned from MusicBrainz.

Still, it's a great place to start. Thanks!

das

[spacefish]

Picard has a lookup button so if you have the file named with the title and the artist, you click Lookup and a search page will open in your browser. You may need to tweak the search criteria to get a list of results. You can probably get more detailed info on how to get the best results out of the program at the tagger support forum. I'm an album listener so rarely need to look up tracks for unknown albums but the couple occasions I have used Picard to do so, I was satisfied with the results. I still use Picard to tag my files and move them out of the tagging folder to the music folder (Picard's sortname fields are great for organization) because MM just doesn't have the same capability.

[das Monkey]

I'll look into the support forum, because it's unusable with the default settings.

I searched on a random sampling of famous Aerosmith songs:

Come Together
Crazy
Cryin'
Dream On
Dude (Looks Like a Lady)
Janie's Got a Gun
Love in an Elevator
Sweet Emotion

It told me Sweet Emotion (from Toys in the Attic) and Come Together (a Beatles cover for Sgt. Pepper's soundtrack) are from the "Armageddon" soundtrack. It found Dude (from Permanent Vacation) and Crazy (from Get a Grip) on the "Big Ones" greatest hits CD. Cryin' (also Get a Grip), Janie's Got a Gun (Pump) and Love in an Elevator (Pump) are all on "Big Ones" as well, but it got them even wronger, putting them on "Best Ballads". Finally, it put Dream On, one of the band's most famous songs, from their self-titled debut album ... on the "Last Action Hero" soundtrack.

8 songs and not a single one of them correct. On the surface, Picard looks like a really cool program, but at present, it's essentially useless.

das

[Teknojnky]

or maybe those particular files were from compilations and not the original album...

but, I understand what you want, you want the original album and not necessarily the (possibly) more accurate non-original album it came off.

ideally, it would give a choice of which album to choose when it appears on more than one, and/or an option to ignore compilations entirely.

anyway, picard uses the music ip PUID fingerprinting technology, which is just recently (within the last year or so) been implemented, so its very likely that many popular tracks get the puid's submitted to compilations before they get attached to the original (or remastered/re-released) cd album.

as the PUID's get associated with the applicable albums, it will get more accurate, and of course as the app comes along it will get more features/flexibilty.

and of course, its always good to remember its free...

you might also try out the jaikoz tagger which also utilizes musicbrainz and the PUID fingerprinting.. but its not free.

btw here some MB threads regarding this very topic

http://forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?id=862
http://forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?id=722
http://forums.musicbrainz.org/viewtopic.php?id=536

[das Monkey]

or maybe those particular files were from compilations and not the original album...

I thought you might say that, but no.

For fun, I just did the converse test. I took a Greatest Hits Bob Dylan CD (not the most popular one, but one that's in their database), ripped it to FLAC, confirmed the results with AccurateRip and scanned them into Picard. It got every single one of them wrong too. This time it found some of the original recordings, some not, but none from the actual CD it came from.

It looks like the database just isn't mature enough to give helpful results yet. And I certainly have no complaints about the software or its freeness. What they're trying to do is very difficult and takes time. I'm glad someone's making the effort. Sadly, it doesn't look like it will be any help to me at this time, though. Still, I appreciate the suggestion.

das

[Guest]

Picard isn't meant for looking up information like that. It's meant to tag things as whole albums. If you use the same experiment and "Cluster" the files before you look them up they should all come out as the Greatest hits Bob Dylan CD.

[spacefish]

Picard isn't meant for looking up information like that. It's meant to tag things as whole albums.

That's true. The old tagger was geared more for individual tracks but I clearly like Picard better. But, hey, I'm an album listener. Makes sense to me.

Another thing to remember is that a lot of tracks will have the same PUID across multiple releases. So a track ripped from a compilation may bring up an original album release as a result. You can try tweaking the criteria under Advanced > Matching and see if it gives you something more desirable. I'm not sure beyond that how Picard determines which track to present first but again, a forum perusal will likely shed some light on that.