Existing albums are not recognized

[jce-zz]

Setup:

1. I added all artists manually since my music library is so large I don't want Headphones to scan it all
2. I configured the correct path to my music library under "Manage"

Issue: For many artists some or all albums are not recognized even of they are existing on the drive. All are named correctly, tagged correctly, etc. but still nothing. I tried to reload these artists but still it doesn't work. And the log does not show anything... The strange thing is that with some artists on the homepage many songs are listed as "have (the bargraphs) but when I go the the artist page, no album is recognized.

Questions:

1. How can I force to recognize an album? Is there a way to pinpoint Headphones to the correct albu?
2. How is the album scanning mechanism working? Which format does it expect?
3. How can I manually re-scan a single artist?

[blackninja01]

I have a sort of the same problem. In my case I have the albums processed by putting them in the download folder and then force headphones to recognize them. This works beautifully BUT....:

The albums are not completely recognized. Although I have the complete album and the compete album is processed it says that (for example) 8/10 songs are downloaded. Some albums have the status "downloaded" but then it says that it doesn't know any songs.

I love headphones but at the moment I don't dare to use it to process my entire database because I'm afraid I lose to much songs.

[klara31]

Same here, a lot of songs are not recognized. My library is maintained by iTunes. Until my library is properly scanned, headphones is unfortunately not very usable...

The log files do not give any information. If specific tests need to be done: please let me know. I am willing to help fix this!

Please fix!

[whiteatom]

I find the scanner is REEEAALY sensitive. I find things just slightly different in the name (brackets, dash, "the remix" instead of just "remix" causes all of mis-matches. Check your file names carefully and then refresh the artist and the problems seem to go away for me.

[rembo10]

I tried to make the matching fuzzier, but its just hard to match up tracks without it just taking forever..... It uses mbid trackids too, so if you have those set itll match up...... It doesnt use a strict folder heirarchy like sickbeard, so it cant id artists/albums based on location alone, it needs metadata

[rembo10]

Im definitely open to ideas though, and working on making the matching more accurate

[Begall]

Out of interest, why not use a folder heirachy? It helps with this problem + cuts down on the visual mess of Headphones matching random 1-2 tracks into other albums that you don't actually have.

[klara31]

Maybe a stupid question, but... Why not try to read the MP3/AAC ID3 tags? My library is maintained by iTunes and has proper tags in all files.

[rembo10]

It does read metadata - first it tries an exact match with artist + song title (matching to musicbrainz data), then it tries a fuzzy match, based on artist +song title stripped of special characters, punctuation, capitalization, etc., then lastly tries a mbid track id, all pulled from the tags.

The only reason why it doesn't use the artist/album hierarchy is because a lot of people don't use that format - although you're right that it would make everything much easier (and faster!), especially the feature I've been working on to tag an existing collection, add fanart, etc.

[klara31]

The problem is not the metadata, but matching it to the proper musicbrainz data. Right?

[rembo10]

Exactly. The problem right now is when a title has like, "feat. Some Artist" in the metadata, but not musicbrainz (just one example) it won't match up without an mbid track id in the tags....

I'm debating switching over to the sickbeard model, using strict folder hierarchies On Jul 14, 2012 6:58 PM, "klara31" < reply@reply.github.com> wrote:

The problem is not the metadata, but matching it to the proper musicbrainz data. Right?

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/rembo10/headphones/issues/632#issuecomment-6982918

[whiteatom]

I actually like the folder idea.. as long as it works with iTunes libraries... Artist/Album/track.mp3

[galfwender]

Could it also use the length of the tracks to help identify?

[JHeat]

I'm for folders cuz this just turned my library into chaos haha

[auspex]

I understand wanting to preferably find a complete match to Musicbrainz, but why can't you add the tracks to the database even when you don't have a match? You seem to be adding lots of Artist records that you haven't been able to disambiguate (which has its own problems - as I'm seeing no way to choose between the two or more possibilities). I just tried to add Adele's 21. While I do tend to edit tags of my music purchases, this is purchased legally, and apparently not even replaygained. Lovesong is about as simple as you can possibly get - one-word artist, one-word album title, one-word track title, and one of the most popular artists in the world. Musicbrainz shows 16 100% matches for the track with the same track length (5:16). So why can't Headphones match to it?

[JHeat]

Any updates on if this will be updated? Headphones not recognizing albums already in my collection is kind of a burn...

Is it a possibility to add an advanced feature that can allow us to just use hierarchy?

[rembo10]

I'll add something where you can manually point to a folder/track for an album/song. I'm working on getting a post-post-processing (adding lyrics, album art, etc. after the original post-processing) feature added so this will come in handy

On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 12:20 PM, JHeat notifications@github.com wrote:

Any updates on if this will be updated? Headphones not recognizing albums already in my collection is kind of a burn...

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/rembo10/headphones/issues/632#issuecomment-18889724 .

[JHeat]

very nice, looking forward to it d00d :O)

[lebuzzer]

why not letting people choose between the current identification method and one based on folder, depending how they manage their library ? but don't forget to keep your fuzzy search, because itunes replaces some specials caracters like for AC/DC, which is not usable for a directory name !

[domross]

I agree with entirely with the ability to manually point to a folder/track, I've just tried to import my library (all tagged beautifully, thanks to my OCD personality) however its saying I'm missing albums that I have, tagged accordingly and all.

Also a way to edit/view the blacklist from within headphones would be nice. I imported my whole library initially thinking headphones would of just detected it, but when I found the naming issue I figure I'd delete everything and add them one by one.

[markrawlingson]

Wouldn't having a folder based structure like SB help speed up the scanner, not slow it down? It just seems to me that if you can't match a single folder against an album in musicbrainz then it would just skip the entire contents rather than pulling the metadata and scraping musicbrainz for a match for each individual file in the folder, which could be dozens.

Also, I would think that most people have either an /artist/album/track.ext format or an /artist - album/track.ext format rather than a /music/album - artist - track.ext format - the latter just seems ridiculously messy to me having all music in a single folder. Do many people really do it this way?

Anyway, @domross words could have been my own. I did exactly the same thing. Deleted my entire lib and now I can't seem to get it back short of re-adding every artist individually.

[domross]

@markrawlingson easiest way to fix this I found was to open the database .db file in a sqllite database browswer and navigate to the blacklist table and delete all the entities in it

[usk78dk]

Any updates on the development for this? Would love to be able to manually match a folder with an album.

I have some of my music ripped from my CD collection, including special editions of some of the albums. I would like to be able to match these to the standard editions in Headphones, so it's listed as one I already have.

[theguardian]

There's a beta feature for this. Click 'Manage' > 'Manage Unmatched'.

[usk78dk]

Found it. Sorry for this newbie question. Could figure it out at first and then found this topic and thought it was still an open issue.

A follow up question is weather it's possible to manually match a single track? I have an album, where one of the tracks isn't match, even though it's there - think it's the filename, but would like to be able to keep the filename and just match it manually. Is this possible?

[usk78dk]

And thank you theguardian for your respons!

[theguardian]

Manual matching doesn't go down to the track level.... yet. It probably makes more sense to implement that functionality on the album page where it's instantly recognizable.

[usk78dk]

Yes, that we be great!

Would love this option, so hope to see it someday (soon ;-) )

[ScarAce1989]

Just hoping that you can select a album and tracks manually. Just setted it up 2 days ago but I'm loving it for automatic downloading from What.cd. Only I don't like the post-processing but that's because the library of Musicbrainz sucks. :(

Very happy that I bought VIP though. It's much faster and no errors at all by now.

Thanks!

[Morgon]

How about implementing a specific Headphones metadata file that can be used to match the Musicbrainz GUID?

For instance, I have an artist/release that has had a number of re-releases with the same name with different track counts/listings which isn't on Last.fm. I also had to manually add it to Musicbrainz. It would be great to have a file in the specific music folder, containing the MB GUID, that HP considers for manual matching and importing.

[tillmanj]

Manual Matching is also not a sustainable solution to essentially broken matching, at least for large libraries. There is absolutely no reason for the following use case to exist:

1) point HP at a directory of properly named folders 2) HP marks a ton of albums and artists as "unmatched" and does not add them to its own database 3) User manually searches for the artist using the header "add artist" search box 4) HP returns one 100% match from the HP VIP Musicbrainz mirror user paid for access to 5) User clicks on the only match to manually add it 6) HP has no problem matching every album to the artist

It seems to me that if the search box only returns a single result, at 100% match, or even a few results but only one 100% match, then HP should be automatically adding the artist. Why this is not the case I do not understand.

[natethegreat141990]

I think with Scanning and adding entries Artist/Album/Track would be the easiest way, and the most efficient way. I mean that IS what sickbeard does and it works nicely. Also to scan the title first and to make a match through the $Artist/$Album/$Title would be a very simple way. That way if example Alabama/40\ Hour\ Week\01\ -\ forty\ hour\ week\ (for\ a\ livin').mp3 showed up than it could look for "Alabama" than 40 hour week then forty hour week. How ever if the album is not in "Alabama" than it would skip to the next album. Maybe share some code with EasyTag. It is opensource community after all.

[NicoLeOca]

Hi Rembo10,

I successfully installed HP on a NAS and it works very well! thanks for developping it! I am a bit confused though. Most of my albums are not properly scanned. it seems the common issue is that the albums' directories & iD3 album tags are named with the year in front. I did it to have Itunes properly sorted. Is there a way to make HP better recognise my albums?

NicoLeOca

[achmetinternet]

So I see albums in the "unmatched" section. When I search for them and add them, the browser starts loading the album but then stops and no tracks are showing etc.

Once I refresh the page it shows proper picture, title and matched tracks. The refresh shouldn't be necessary.

[basilfx]

@achmetinternet This is unrelated to this issue. If you can, could you see if there are any JavaScript errors involved?

[achmetinternet]

Where should I look for them?