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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

the problem with false positives is that a single instance means you have to review every record meticulously, because you have no idea where the system has lied to you, or how many times (because the system itself doesn't). If you're going to review everything anyways, it's often better to simply be slow and correct to begin with rather than diff and correct every item.

this is why it's usually better to be overaggressive with saying "I don't know" rather than crossing your fingers and shitting out an answer and hoping you get away with it.

When did we switch the conversation to LLM issues? =)

One of the devs for a company I used to work shocked me when he said "bad data is better than no data" when inquiring about why the input field was limited to a drop down of pre-filled values that were irrelevant with no way of filling in correct data. At that point, I just felt the entire database was suspect

Often not, because it's less effort to type the information in fresh than to review and edit the existing information.

I'm not saying the services are always overly incorrect, just that they're incorrect often enough that the path of least resistance was to stop using them.

Plus, it gave me something to do while the CD was importing rather than just pushing into the background while I started working on something else and promptly forget about the import.

Depends how long it takes you to figure out what the problems are and fixing them.

Debugging is usually harder than coding, and the amount of data we are talking about is fairly small. Just typing it in could easily be faster.

It depends. I'd like to argue that you have to enter the information one way or another, why not share it and save others the work in the future, but in reality it is often quite a bit slower. MusicBrainz likes to collect more information than a normal CD riper would ask for, with more pages to click-through, so that is a bit slower. However, the main annoyance is when you have to make a correction that isn't auto approved, and then you have to wait 7 days before your tagger/ripper software will see changes you made. I wish there was a better workflow to tell Picard to use a pending edit[1].

I still always use MusicBrainz, and enjoy contributing to it, but more like others enjoy contributing to Wikipedia, rather than as an efficiency boost.

[1]https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/PICARD-1278

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 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.

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.

Never worked fine for me, at least not fine enough to trust it.

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.

It's used as the basis in a _lot_ of places. So fixing errors fixes them in a lot of other websites (and infoboxes).

Note that the scope of the project goes beyond CDs, it's a catalogue for pretty much any format where you can play music.

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