Unknown artist / unknown album in Banshee & Rhythmbox for all music

Question

I've been trying to import the music from my CDs into Banshee but for some reason the music doesn't have any information about the artist, album etc e.g. the year is given as 1, the names of the tracks are all track 1, track 2 etc and the artist name is unknown artist.

I have also tried it with Rhythmbox but have encountered the same problems. The strange thing is on previous installs of Ubuntu Banshee has worked very well at importing music from the same CDs I am now having problems with (i.e. all of them).

I have a few elementary project PPAs installed; could this be messing it up? Or is it something else?

Answer 1

Banshee (and probably Rhythmbox) automatically gets metadata for CDs from MusicBrainz.org. Some recent changes with MusicBrainz broke CD metadata lookup in Banshee. Since then, Banshee has been fixed to work with the new MusicBrainz API, but unfortunately, no stable releases have been made since the fixes were committed.

You can get these updates by switching to the daily builds of Banshee, but unless you're interested in testing pre-beta-quality software and reporting bugs, you probably want to stay away from daily builds. The next stable version of Banshee will be released in September.

For more information, see this answer.