Unable to find a Specific Release: Due to punctuation, maybe? #1437
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needinfo
We need more details or follow-up from the filer before this can be tagged "bug" or "feature."
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A little more info here to help..... I did eventually get Beets to detect the correct release. It seems that the apostrophe is what caused the issue. By entering 'E' for Enter Search, I entered the following values, which returned the correct match: Artist: A |
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Thanks for the additional details. Can you also include:
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sampsyo
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Sorry for the delay... I have the info for you now though. I found another example that seems to be a related issue, where the artist name 'A. Paul Ortega' releases aren't found, but a subsequent manual search for 'Paul Ortega' results in successful matches on Discogs for two of his releases. Note that I changed some file and folder names to remove the '.' (period) and ''' (apostrophe) characters to see if that would help, and it didn't seem to have any effect. Anyway, sorry for the long message, but info and verbose output on import for these three releases is below. Let me know if I can help in further testing or providing any additional info to help resolve this issue. A. Paul Ortega examples: |
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Thanks for the additional information. I did some digging, and this seems to be fundamental to the Discogs search engine—there's not really anything we can do about it. Here's the Discogs search page for the search terms "The A's Four Dances E.P.". The expected release doesn't come up. This search for "A Four Dances" somehow finds the artist. You can try entering "As Four Dances" (just removing the apostrophe) and that also doesn't work. I can't see any reasonable policy beets can use to get better results—the Discogs search engine is just being finicky. Fortunately, we have that "enter search" album for exactly this circumstance! And see this search for the Ortega release; there are no results at all. If you have any bright ideas for how we can work around this shortcoming in Discogs, we could try entertaining them.
Yes, that won't change anything: filenames are not used for matching (except with the fromfilename plugin). |
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Adrian, thanks for looking into this. I do have an idea I will run by you, but, admittedly, it's not optimal. I did some searches on Discogs after your post and see exactly what you are describing. Even Discogs' Advanced Search doesn't seem to work any better than a general search when there are punctuation characters in an artist name or release title (I noticed the same issue on titles with punctuation as well). Anyway, for what it is worth, I've noticed that if you use sub-strings longer than 2 or 3 characters (excluding punctuation characters), the search does work a bit better. So, you might consider a search for Discogs only to go something like this:
As stated, this is a bit convoluted, but is a close of an approximation to how I have found matches manually on a few releases. Of course, it is completely up to you if you would want to try this. Maybe this approach could be used only if no other matches are found? In any event, it seems to be a low percentage of releases that go undetected with the current version. Thanks for writing such an impressive and useful application and numerous plugins! |
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Interesting! So does it seem like terms less than three characters long are causing the problem? Or is it just when these terms are separated by punctuation? If it's the latter, maybe a simpler algorithm would just, for every term, drop everything after the punctuation (if it occurs late in the word). |
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Based on what I've seen, the punctuation seems to be causing the issue, but for some reason, segments following the first punctuation character in an artist name or title cause the search not to work when those substrings are less than 3 characters. If you are interested, I can start gathering some additional releases that exhibit the same problem. It seems that the short segments are hosing the search for some reason. Discogs has struggled with getting their searches to optimized for quite some time, so, I'm not all that surprised to find that there are still lingering issues. Let me know if you want me to gather some more examples. |
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Great! Thank you for looking into it. Some additional examples would be awesome; maybe we can put together a small battery of tests. |
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Interesting finding just now.... If you enclose the artist name in double quotes, and enclose the title in double quotes, the search seems to work with the punctuation. Artist: "A's" I will get you some examples in the coming days. Hopefully we can find out a bit more about the nuances of the Discogs search. |
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The plugin didn't seem to be able to find the following release for some reason. I'm not sure if it was the apostrophe and/or the comma in the artist name, or if the artist name in my file being "A's" vs, "A's, The"...
http://www.discogs.com/As-Four-Dances/release/577452
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