Prefere original album to compilations

[ljouhault]

So for context, I just started with beets to organise a large unorganized, with poor metadata (only title and artist, nothing else). I used the singleton option since the file have no information concerning albums.
It worked fine, beets match it most of the time to the correct musicbrainz track.
However, it sometimes (often) match the track to a compilation release rather than an original album release. As a result, it scattered my track in lots of irrelevant, single track albums. Like i have 10 tracks from the same original album, but beets found those tracks in various compilations and now i have 5 compilation album with 2 tracks each.
Is there any way to prevent/fix that ?

[Hikari-Tsai]

The main cause is importing these files as singletons. Singleton matching treats every recording independently, so it has no evidence that ten tracks belong together; any MusicBrainz release containing each recording—including compilations—is a plausible source.

If the files are known to come from the same original album, put them in one directory and import that directory as an album. Album matching uses the track list, order, lengths, missing/unmatched tracks, and shared release, which strongly favors the original album:

beet import /incoming/Artist/Album

At the prompt, use Enter ID and paste the MusicBrainz release UUID when you know the correct release. For an already imported set, regroup the source files and re-import them, or use library re-import on an existing album record; separately imported singletons cannot be automatically merged merely by preferring a release type.

You can also improve release selection with:

match:
  preferred:
    original_year: yes

but that is only a distance preference, not a “never use compilations” rule. The reliable fix is album-mode matching. For loose tracks whose album is genuinely unknown, review singleton matches interactively rather than using quiet automatic acceptance, because MusicBrainz recordings commonly appear on many releases.