Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Sooloos album look up issues

Any idea why albums that are present on AllMusic aren't found by Sooloos when the AMG number is cut & pasted into the "Import Metadata" box?

Because Sooloos uses its own metadata service and not the AMG online one?

I understand that bit. However they specifically ask for the AMG number on the edit screen. Seems strange if they can't use it. It seems that some it can find (via AMG) yet not others.

Hi,

Although it does use the AMG / ROVI ID the metadata that is searched is an amalgamation of data from several sources. I guess the question really is �how often is this data refreshed from the 3rd party databases?�

I believe that Meridian is aware that the Sooloos metadata look up system needs an overhaul. It would be nice if they published a road map for this but we know that don�t.

Regards,
Carl

It's also worth noting that the listings on Rovi's website are not identical to those on the database to which they license access.

It would be nice if they actually had a Rovi/AMG field where you could paste or pull in the code number.

Have you checked the wiki. This is explained in some detail. If there is confusion, let me know and I can edit the wiki to be clearer. Or if its a new issue I can add it.

The two common problems

* AMG Id is not padded to correct string length, rovi is more reliable in this sense
* if its an album with multiple releases you may be using the WRONG AMG id

Cheers
Greg

Is it possible that the look up works in the background by comparing the number of tracks in combination with their length?

I noticed, that Sooloos doesn't find albums where in the AMG/Rovi database the length of the tracks are stored with 0:00 instead of the right length.

I'm not really sure ... but it could be a hint.

it could be that the metadata "upgrade" has caused some problems with the AMG data lookup that does or doesn't happen anymore.

While I am done with importing until I buy a new CD, one of my new ones failed to find metadata last week. Sonic Youth, SYR 3 with Jim O'Rourke. SYR 1 and 2 both imported before no problem.

I just noticed a related problem -- it's not picking up Mood info for some reason, even when it correctly identifies the album and all other metadata is correct. I went to Allmusic Guide and found the albums, and the Mood data is there (pretty sure M is using that data from AMG). Had to enter by hand. Odd.

You misunderstood my comment, I wasn't very clear.

I'd like Sooloos to have a field that, once it's looked up the album, it stores an identifier in it. That way I can go directly to that release and try and sense where there are issues, or discover why metadata are missing etc. When you go into debug and drill down to the metadata fields in the operating database there doesn't appear to be a field with this datum in it.

I see where you are coming from, but I am not sure that it would make sense as Sooloos uses its own metadata lookup service that has aggregated from a number of sources.

What do you store in this field, the Sooloos ID, the AMG/Rovi ID? The Sooloos ID would only be an internal lookup, so apart from confirming that Album A is exactly the same as Album A!, I cannot see a use for that. If it was the AMG/Rovi ID, that only makes sense if the metadata was sourced wholly from AMG/Rovi. But a lot of data on Sooloos is aggregated from a number of sources.

Only recently, I went through the metadata lookup process with a fellow HHer. They were trying to find where data from a certain album had been populated from as there were discrepancies with AMG. Using the AMG/Rovi API, which is more feature rich than the web pages, we looked up all the metadata for this album, yet we could not find where some of the information had been populated from nor conclusively confirm that it had actually been populated from AMG/Rovi. The conclusion was that this particular album was using data that either had not been sourced from AMG/Rovi or that it was aggregated data from a number of sources. I later confirmed with Meridian directly something that was initially said by them at the Sooloos HH2 'reveal', which was that Sooloos used its own metadata service.

Unfortunately, a proportion of this data is either stale, incomplete or invalid. However, Meridian are aware of this and hopefully are doing something about it.