Discogs search problem - since 5.0.2.

[gonnemans]

Hi there, my first post here. I love dvdpedia & cdpedia (got both).
Little problem now... I use solely Discogs to add new items in cdpedia, imho the best to fill my cdpedia library's
Unfortunately, since 5.0.2. the search results are zero or a few, not nearly what it used to be.
In 5.0.1. I could type the catalogue number and it would return instantly the right edition. Now when I type in "kinks village green" it will return 0 results!! (and not the probably 15+ results of this great and classic Kinks album).
Any idea? Is it 5.0.2. or is it Discogs perhaps, I'm puzzled (maybe it's me!)

Greetings, Ernst

[Nora]

What are your search settings and search terms so I can try to repeat the problem here? I just tried a search using DiscoGS with my limiter set to Title and search term "The Outlaws" and got 9 results.

We did update the DiscoGS plug-in with this latest version since their API officially changed on the Jan. 15th. But since you're already running version 5.0.2 that shouldn't be the issue.

[gonnemans]

Thanks for the quick reply. Super!
Now I did the same with 'the Outlaws' and got 9 results. The same amount.
But then I searched with 'the outlaws hurry' (doing this 'cause this is referring to their 1977 classic Hurry Sundown Anyway, I got zero search results!, and that's peculiar, in previous versions I would definitely get several (probably 4 or so).
And 9 results for just 'the outlaws' is very little btw, considering that these guys rocked for a quarter of a century and made 20+ albums. And there are several bands called the Outlaws.

Greetings, Ernst

[Nora]

You can't put the artist and the title together unfortunately for the DiscoGS search - you have to choose one or the other and set the limiter accordingly. For example, enter "Hurry Sundown" into the search window, select DiscoGS from your list of search sites using the little magnifying glass in the search field and set the limiter in the search window to 'Title'. That should get you 9 results, the first one being the correct one.

(But I agree that there is something funky going on since not all these results match the search term so we'll take another look at the plug-in and the new API, thanks for bringing it up.)

EDIT: Conor took another look at the plug-in. One major change with 5.0.2 is that the plug-in now only picks up the 'Master' entries from DiscoGS, ensuring that the results are a bit more manageable. (When all results are returned it becomes a bit overwhelming and useless because there are lots of double entries, incomplete ones, singles, etc.) But with the cool new sub-menus that the search window offers now we've included a choice for users between Masters and Releases so if you want ALL the results for a title search, you can get them. Download CDpedia Beta 12 for the fix.

[gonnemans]

I take a deep bow to you and Conor. The beta version did solve the problem indeed! I use 'releases' instead of 'master'.

I was used in putting 'band+part of the title+a part of the catalogue number' in the same search window (and that always got me a result), but this will work also (maybe even better).
Again: many thanks!

A happy costumer, greetings,

Ernst

[davidagbr]

Hi,

I am having a very similar problem using the Discogs search in CDpedia 5.1.1. Often when I search the Discogs site via CDpedia, I get few or no results.

For example; I have just searched for the artist Neville Nash, the Discogs site lists 24 releases. However, when I try the same search through CDpedia I get the message "There are no matches for "Neville Nash". Try removing the 'Artist' limit."

I then tried the catalog number search for "PTM", and found one of the Neville Nash albums that I was looking for. But... then when I try to search for "NALP (V) 3320", there are again no matches!!

I get the same results for numerous artists, the artist, catalog number or title are in Discogs, but CDpedia can't find them.

I'm not sure if it's me that's doing something wrong, or if there's a problem in CDpedia and/or it's connection to Discogs.

I hope you can help on this.

David

[Nora]

Thanks for the examples, we'll take a look at that and see what we can do to better the search with DiscoGS.

[Conor]

I found the problem and a fix for it although it really is an issue with DiscoGS's search. For some reason Neville Nash isn't listed as an artist in their advanced search but he is in the regular search (you can check that out on the DiscoGS website). I've changed it in CDpedia so that when the artist search doesn't get any results it automatically flips to the title search and tries that instead.
I've also fixed the catalogue number search so that it now strips out parentheses and other additions that confuse the search and return blank results. Thanks for all the details, that made the bug hunting a lot easier.

Please try out the CDpedia beta and let me know how it goes.