How do I find out which tracks MA doesn't like?

[msknight]

A directory scan of my music says I've got more than 40,000 files. MA says it's got 36,000 tracks.

How do I find out the files that it's got issues with please?

I'm also working my way through all my files to put in album artists to stop the errors, but dict errors are also creeping back into files I've already re-converted to 44.1k so I'm struggling.

I'm working off the log file, but it's obvious that there are issues that aren't showing up in there, and files that it's not even reporting on and I can't find out which files it's not importing, if you know what I mean.

I'd love to be able to pull a report from it, to see what files it's discarded, and why, because without this information, I can't fix any problems in my collection.

Grateful for advice because I'm feeling like I'm up against a wall, in the dark, and it's cold and wet, and I just want to go home :-D

[msknight]

I can confirm, however, that running the files into Audacity and then converting and exporting them... strips the album artist.

No idea where I go from here.

[msknight]

I decided to go on an epic journey ensuring all files have an album artist, and then reset the database, but MA is complaining that files don't have album artist and easytag is saying, yes they do. However it does seem like there are problems with what are considered, "extended" tags and album artist seems to be among these tags where there is no "agreement" on how it should be represented. I've got hundreds of files failing on this and filling the log, even though they've all been done.

Some were done by a scanning script to set the album artist to be the same as the artist if the field was found empty, and I had to use two different tools, one for flac and one for mp3...
metaflac --set-tag="ALBUMARTIST=$artist" "$filen"
eyeD3 --album-artist "$artist" "$filen"

I've had cases where metaflac was saying, "Yes, it's got an album artist, here it is," and EasyTag showing a blank for the album artist... so... big sigh... not sure where I go from here.

It looks like I'm going to have to live with the situation because the dict thing means that they won't show up in MA at all, but I still have the situation of more than 40,000 files present and MA only showing 36,000 tracks, with no easy way to find out what MA didn't scan, other than going through the whole collection, track by track, to see if MA brought it in.

[OzGav]

This is the data format that MA accept https://kodi.wiki/view/Music_tagging

There will be a log entry for missing album artists. You can change the default behaviour to use the track artist as the album artist if it makes sense to do so.

[msknight]

What about the files which it hasn't even attempted to parse? I've got about 4,000 files that aren't even appearing in the log. I've got no clue which files it hasn't attempted to import unless I go through the whole collection, file by file, to find them.

The ones that are reporting problems in the log, I can do something about ... except the album artist, because if I put the artists in with EasyTag, they then fail with the dict error problem.

[msknight]

Is there any way I can query the database directly please? I know SQL.

[OzGav]

Sorry we are not going to explain how to do that. It is complex and prone to create more problems that then need fixing

[msknight]

Can you tell me where the database file is please? I can copy it off and examine it on another machine. I've tried to find the file, but so far no luck. AI hasn't been able to help me locate it.

[OzGav]

It is stored with the server

[msknight]

Is there a folder and file name I can copy off please?