CDpedia's 'Update from' function gets wrong info

[thomaskyhn]

Most of the times I try to update manually entered CDs using the 'Update from' function, I get data from completely unrelated CDs. Is there a special way of doing this? Or could it be an issue with the software?

[Nora]

What search site are you selecting? I would recommend using the little gear button in the Edit window instead even though this means you have to update entries individually instead of doing it in batches. The advantage of the gear button over the 'update from' command is that if there is more than one result returned for the search, the drawer on the side of the Edit window will pop out and give you the option to select the correct one. The 'update from' command on the other hand downloads the first result automatically. (This is great if your entries have an identifying number such as a DogTag or Freebase ID and you're downloading information from that site so the entry can be identified correctly without having to rely on the title and/or artist.)

[thomaskyhn]

Thanks for your help. This works better, but for most CDs I still get wrong results even though those CDs are listed on the site I'm searching.

An example. I have a manual entry with the following data:

Artist: Boredoms
Title: Wow 2
Label: Avant
Catalog #:AVAN 026
Format: CD

I try to update it from Discogs, where the CD is listed with the same data, but CDpedia gives me four other CDs to choose from.

Any ideas?

[Nora]

Thanks for the additional info. You're correct that with that information the program doesn't get the correct result from DiscoGS because "Wow 2" is listed as a release, not a master, and thus isn't included in the results returned. And the DiscoGS search requires us to choose between searching for a title or an artist, it can't do both at once.
We can change this for the next version to have the gear search access the releases instead of the masters to bring up a broader field of results. If you'd like to try it out in the CDpedia beta, you can download that here.

[thomaskyhn]

Thanks for your reply! I'll give the beta a try.

[thomaskyhn]

The beta is much better. But I still get lots of completely unrelated results. For instance, if I search for 'Mad Max' by Dub Sonic, I get about 40 results, half of which are by bands called Mad Max.

[thomaskyhn]

Addition. A lot of the results I get when trying to add CDs using the Add (Cmd + F) function seem completely arbitrary.

Examples.

Searching for 'Muzak' by Tapes Klar! (which is listed on Discogs) using the search terms "tapes klar muzak", I get about 40 results, but none of them correct.

Searching for 'Pioneers - The Beginning of Danish Electronic Music' (also listed on Discogs) using the search terms "Pioneers - The Beginning of Danish Electronic Music", I also get lots of results, but the right one is not among them.

[Nora]

Sorry it took me a while to get back to you on this but I can't repeat the problem here with your examples. I enter "tapes klar muzak" into the search field and set my filters to Title and Release. That gives me one result from DiscoGS.
Searching for "Pioneers - The Beginning of Danish Electronic Music" again with the filters set to Title and Release I get two results, the first one being the correct one.

If this is not the case for you, please download the latest beta version for CDpediaBeta 23 and let me know how the searches go for you there.

[thomaskyhn]

I think perhaps there's something I'm missing – how do you set the filters to Title and Release? I can't find any options for that.

[Nora]

When you select DiscoGS as your search site (by clicking on the little magnifying glass in the search field), the available filters appear. These are different for each site since it depends on the search options they offer but for DiscoGS you can choose to search by title or artist and release or masters.

[thomaskyhn]

I'm afraid this still doesn't work too well. When I search Discogs for 'Chan Leong Jung' (http://www.discogs.com/artist/Chan+Leong+Jung) with the search preferences set to limit to artist, I get no results. The Masters/Releases setting makes no difference.

[Nora]

I think this might be a case of mis-labeled artist/title on DiscoGS because when I set the search settings to 'Title' and 'Release' and search for "Chan Leong Jung" I get the one result that DiscoGS has for that artist. If you find other entries that CDpedia doesn't find please let us know so we can look into that some more.

[thomaskyhn]

You're right, it works with 'Title' and 'Release'. I'll let you know if I find any others.