Best way to import a multi-cd "album" which is not on MusicBainz/Discogs

[halloleo]

I have some "albums" which span mutiple CDs. When I rip them on my Mac they come up as Unknown Artist/Unknown Album/Track 1-01.wav... for the first CD and as and the second CD Unknown Artist/Unknown Album/Track 2-01.wav...

What's the best way to import this with beets and give MusicBainz a chance to find the CDs?

[DjSlash]

Many rip software still tries to use CDDB or the likes. That's too bad, because they became obsolete. Anyway, luckily everybody can contribute on the completeness of MusicBrainz (MB). 🎉

With beets, if the album is on MB, you can provide the release ID during import (choose enter Id, copy the URL of the release from MB and paste it).

If the album is not on MB, add it on MB before the import.

There are plugins that can help in this process:

• edit
• mbsumbit

[halloleo]

Thanks for this.

Though it is still unclear to me how beets can detect automatically what album these *.wav files represent.

[DjSlash]

It can't. Beets uses existing metadata, but if that isn't present, it will fail.

[halloleo]

Interesting, so it does not do this CD checksum thing CDDB did back in the day when it worked?

[DjSlash]

No, that's a different kind of process. The rip-software should do that.

Although, you could use the chroma plugin. It's a bit of a fiddle to set up, but it fingerprints files and that can help with identifying.