Album import tries to search even if artist and album are missing

[JOJ0]

Tracks without empfy album information are tried to be grouped together in an album which leads to useless search results.

Problem

Running this command:

$ beet import -t -g /remote/data/music-archive/DrumnbassJungleDrumfunk/0-Single-Tracks/Crossfire 

/remote/data/music-archive/DrumnbassJungleDrumfunk/0-Single-Tracks/Crossfire/crossfire - Battlefield.mp3
/remote/data/music-archive/DrumnbassJungleDrumfunk/0-Single-Tracks/Crossfire/Crossfire - Firebolt.mp3
/remote/data/music-archive/DrumnbassJungleDrumfunk/0-Single-Tracks/Crossfire/Crossfire - Hydra (Cell D Rmx)-2.mp3
/remote/data/music-archive/DrumnbassJungleDrumfunk/0-Single-Tracks/Crossfire/Crossfire - Lethal formz.mp3
/remote/data/music-archive/DrumnbassJungleDrumfunk/0-Single-Tracks/Crossfire/Crossfire - Nightscape.mp3
/remote/data/music-archive/DrumnbassJungleDrumfunk/0-Single-Tracks/Crossfire/Crossfire - Sword  Fight.mp3
/remote/data/music-archive/DrumnbassJungleDrumfunk/0-Single-Tracks/Crossfire/Crossfire_-_Northern_Lightz.mp3 (7 items)
Finding tags for album " - ".
Candidates:
1. Marco Wellisch - Shambakla (30.7%) (tracks, album, artist, ...) (Beatport, Digital, 2021, Moehre Rekorder, MORE009)
2. Issam Ogur - Antares (29.0%) (album, artist, tracks, ...) (Beatport, Digital, 2022, Krad Records, KRD380)
3. aetos - Symphonies Of December (17.7%) (album, artist, unmatched tracks, ...) (Beatport, Digital, 2021, recordJet, RLS00178501)
4. Charmes - Doing To Me (15.5%) (unmatched tracks, album, artist, ...) (Beatport, Digital, 2022, IN CONTROL RECORDINGS, ICR056)
5. Fanfickk - Feel Better (Waker Remix) (15.3%) (unmatched tracks, album, artist, ...) (Beatport, Digital, 2021, recordJet, RLS00177899)
# selection (default 1), Skip, Use as-is, as Tracks, Group albums,
Enter search, enter Id, aBort, eDit, edit Candidates, plaY? 

It seems the reason that --group-albums tries to find an album for all these tracks is that they share the same information in the album tag: Nothing/Empfy as well as in the artist tag: Nothing/Empty

Proposed solution

A warning could be thrown at the user that since we are dealing with insufficient information, it does not make sense to search any api.

Also the only useful thing at this prompt for a user to do is to either change to singelton mode, or to group these albums together in a "pseudo album", named something like "Album Unknown" and then try to reimport those files later on. This could somehow also be thrown at the user instead of uselessly searching an api.

Setup

• OS: Manjaro
• Python version: 3.10.8
• beets version: 1.6.1 git-master
• Turning off plugins made problem go away: no

My configuration (output of beet config) is:

• I'll post a longish config once we decide it would help.

[sampsyo]

Yeah, this is annoying behavior. In fact, this goes beyond just --group-albums: even in the "normal" album import mode, it's possible for albums to be missing metadata altogether, resulting in exactly the same confusing search.

Maybe the solution is to do some kind of warning, like you suggest, but totally decoupled from --group-albums: just do it before searching if we ever are truly metadata-free, which would result in a meaningless search?

[JOJ0]

I once built an early exit if artist and album is missing into candidates method of the Discogs plugin. Probably a solution as you suggest that covers MusicBrainz as well as all metadata source plugins is the way to go and would then replace that for that particular plugin and provide it for all the other plugins. I'll see if I get around to getting an implementation started and in the meantime wait and hope somebody else picks it up. I'd be happy to review a PR.

[pioneerHitesh]

@JOJ0 This issue is fixed No matching release found for 2 tracks. For help, see: https://beets.readthedocs.org/en/latest/faq.html#nomatch

[JOJ0]

@JOJ0 This issue is fixed

``No matching release found for 2 tracks.

For help, see: https://beets.readthedocs.org/en/latest/faq.html#nomatch``

@pioneerHitesh I'm not sure I understand. Why are you sure it is fixed? And why does the output you posted prove that? Please elaborate! Thanks:-)