Hi,
I regularly add new titles by using one of these as input:
Most of the times this suffices for finding a title. I know that Discogs is used as a source for finding titles. But sometimes a cd is not found, even though I can find it on Discogs. Even using the exact title+artist as used on Discogs has no results.
What goes wrong here?
Thanks for your question. We only update our Discogs mirror once per month. You can expect a delay, especially for new releases.
Last Monday we updated our mirror and this was the result:
Inserted albums: 83145
Inserted discs: 101572
Inserted barcodes: 21426
Processing 83145 items
Jos,
Apart from the monthly updates to our Discogs mirror, we also use the Discogs API to search the live Discogs database, but only when you search by barcode or Catalog number.
So even if a CD or vinyl album is not in our Discogs mirror yet, you should still be able to find it.
Thanks for the quick replies. I also discovered that one of the problems is the fact that sometimes typos are made in the barcode when entering them in Discogs. I correct them every time I encounter one.
When adding by barcode or Catalog number, is there a way to restrict the results to a media type, like vinyl or CD?
Itâs frustrating to go through some of these popular older items with 50+ variants, half of which are all subtle different mistake copies of what youâre trying to add and finding that I accidently added the CD version when I meant Vinyl, or vice-versa.
When you add by Title, yes, you can filter by format.
When adding by barcode, the idea is that you get exactly the item you have in your hands, as the barcode should be different for each release.
Iâve been recently focused on my Vinyl, and typically the items donât have barcodes. When using the Catalog number, they were used for multiple media types. Mostly itâs CDs mixed with Vinyl - I canât say for sure, but it appears that cassettes and 8-tracks didnât use them.
I also have problems with finding some titles.
If I for example try to add the deathless sun, it doesnât find anything.
If I search for the deathless sun on Discogs it finds the record by Behemoth, added several months ago. Try it yourself.
Other then that, love the system!
@CLZ_Alwin
You should be VERY careful about that. Make sure that the release you have in your possession is the exact one you are looking at in Discogs.
The different barcode you see may in fact be a reflection of a different release. Discogs is ârelease orientedâ - CLZ is âalbum orientedâ.
There may be many different releases of an album recognized by Discogs. CDs are particularly prone to this, with many seemingly identical releases having different barcodes. A different barcode is different artwork, and thus a different release. The barcode may in fact reflect a European versus American release or a change in distribution company or any number of things.
So you really need to be careful when correcting Discogs - donât be afraid to, just be careful.
On the other hand, if you mean you correct it on your CLZ database, then that is perfectly fine. Since CLZ doesnât distinguish between releases, you can pick which ever one of the sometimes hundreds releases found on Discogs that gets you close and âfix it upâ as appropriate.
For me, I wish CLZ had a bit more info on the search results screen to distinguish between Discogs recognized releases so I could get closer quicker, but there are more important things to worry about in life. 
This is indeed a good rule of thumb actually, since if you pick the âwrongâ entry in Core, for your collection, thereâs not much information that downloads that actually distinguishes it as much as it does on Discogs. So get the right tracks and cover, and make your album âmore yoursâ by editing and and adding more data!
What kind of extra information would you like to see?
Ya caught me. Iâm not adding stuff just at the moment to be able to remind myself, but Iâll work on it.
But my first thought is that sometimes the cover image doesnât come up in the search results - or rather out of 20 hits there will only be 13 covers or so. But then when selected and added to the DB, magically the cover is there - sometimes.
Thatâs not responsive to your query, but it is an example of trying to get the right hit.
Oh⌠Hereâs two ideas: 1) release country. 2) main label.
Hereâs a sample search: Try to add âJeff Beck Truthâ by artist and title.
The search results contains many many entries in all formats, so filter down to just vinyl. Notice that many covers are not displayed in the hit list, but if you click on the entry, the cover does appear in the details screen.
Half of the entries are for the âtwo ferâ Truth/Beck-Ola so we can ignore those (except some have an illegal cover image for Discogs which need to be corrected, but that has nothing to do with MuC core - I hope).
Now if Iâm looking to add the recent Mobile Fidelity release, I have to look through each and every Truth vinyl edition displayed in the search results list. This task would be made easier if the record label (MoFi) was displayed in the results list. Seems like I should be able to recognize it because the MoFi cover has an easily recognizable strip across the top. But I donât see it in the list. perhaps it is one that doesnât show. Alternatively I could identify it if the RPM were displayed since this release is a 45rpm.
Other issues could be eased by including the country (maybe just a flag image?) so we could distinguish between Australian and American and European releases quickly.
Anyway, just my thoughts. Iâm not all that fussed and these ideas are ânice to haveâ not priorities. I know how to update a ânot quite rightâ entry when I select it. But the record label would be really nice to go along with the catalog number.
Or, if we could search using Discogs number, for example r2919409, then we could find the correct release on Discogs, take Discogs number, search for that in clz and then always get the correct version in clz.