[Abcde-users] comparing many cddb entries for a disc

[Snild Dolkow]

On Thu Mar 2 05:49:00 GMT 2023, Dave Laub wrote:
> Louis' recent patch brought something to mind. I recently ripped the
> album "Closer" by Joy Division, & was prompted by abcde to pick from
> 10 musicbrainz listings (!). It turned out the differences were minor
> (the release year a.k.a. DYEAR, and the comment indicating Disc
> length). But I know for some other releases I've ripped, I've
> encountered more significant differences & definitely had a
> preference.
> 
> That leads me to ask: when many releases are returned for a disc, how
> do folks decide which to pick? Do you use your terminal window's
> scrollbar to repeatedly scroll up/down through the long output,
> trying to eyeball the best one? Do you rerun abcde and tee off the
> output to a file which you then pop around in with your favorite text
> editor, trying to determine the best entry? Something else?

As a new user, trying to (re)start a CD collection and rip it all, I've
just defaulted to picking the first option, unless I see some very
obvious difference. If it turns out to be the wrong one (and the only
way I have to detect that is getting the wrong cover art), I press ^C
and `rm -rf` the abcde tmp dir.

Trying to pick the right match for my wife's "More ABBA Gold" CD
finally frustrated me enough to start looking for a better way to
disambiguate, possibly by changing the script -- my idea was to show at
least the year, and maybe a link to the DB entry. That's what brought
me into the mail archives, where I found this email and necro'd its
thread. :)

The ABBA CD in front of me is dated 2008, and the four candidates are
1993, 1996, 2008, and 2014, so just having the year shown would've been
very helpful in this case.

As suggested in https://abcde.einval.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=98 ,
an indication that diffing entries is an option might also have been
helpful in some past rips. I had no idea that this existed (and I will
now immediately set DIFFOPTS=-y).

...and it turns out that the diff actually shows the year as well. Even
more reason to document this feature's existence.

> 
> What I've done lately is start another terminal, cd into abcde's
> working directory, and then isolate the best one with this:
> 
>     best=./cddbread.1
>     for i in $(find . -maxdepth 1 -name 'cddbread.*' | sort -t. -
> k3,3n); do
>          [ "$best" = "$i" ] && continue
>          printf "Comparing $best to $i ...\n"
>          diff $best $i
>          printf "a or b? [abq] "
>          read REPLY
>          [ 'q' = "$REPLY" ] && break
>          [ 'b' = "$REPLY" ] && best=$i
>     done
>     echo best is "$best"
> 
> Does anyone see value in something like that? If so I'll write a
> patch & submit it.

Optometrist-style. Sure, that'd be more convenient than keeping track
of the best-so-far myself and manually triggering each diff.

//Snild