Freaker retrieves incorrect info

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Guest

Freaker retrieves incorrect info

Post by Guest » Wed Dec 15, 2004 3:33 pm

I have about 20000 songs that I ran freaker on, trying to get album cover art. But I have found many of the songs mislabeled by the process. For example, Dave Brubeck's Take Five now has song titles from Dave Brubeck's Gone with the Wind. It seems to be only 1 or 2 percent, but with that much music, thats alot. And I can only find the incorrect stuff by going song to song, which is kind of unlikely. Also,it seems concentrated in specific albums, as opposed to having hit completely randomly. John Hiatt's Slow turning was completely wrong, and Bring the Family was completely right, for example.

Suggestions?
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beastie
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Re: Freaker retrieves incorrect info

Post by beastie » Mon Dec 20, 2004 1:06 pm

Without debugging through the exact process you went through, it's difficult to be 100% certain, but I'm pretty certain that this sort of effect would be the result of using "Song Title" set to Overwrite. If you had "Allow partial matches" turned on, the problem can be even worse; here's a sample scenario of what can go wrong in these circumstances.
  • Hypothetically searching with "Song Title" set to Overwrite, with "Allow partial matches": track #6 of album Space Oddity by David Bowie. Beforehand (properly) titled "Janine".

    MPFreaker searches for all albums it can find by David Bowie that have "Space Oddity" as at least part of the album name, looking for the oldest one. Imagine that some dodgy record company has released an album called "Man of Words: Space Oddity" with a mixture of Bowie tracks of the era, and has dated it 1971. Track #6 on this imaginary album is "Letter to Hermione", so MPFreaker incorrectly renames this song to "Letter to Hermione".
Short version: use "Song Title" overwrite with care, even without "Allow partial matches". The feature was originally intended for looking up track titles for songs titled "Track 01" and the like, such as those ripped from Audio CDs while not connected to the internet for CDDB lookup.

Long story short (too late): For this reason, beta 16 now warns of the consequences when searching for "Song Title" with it set to Overwrite. My apologies to those bitten by this behavior.

Leon
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