When exactly does "Automatic matching" happen?

[seadowg]

I've been playing around with Music Assistant over the last week, and the one thing I'm confused about is the "automatic matching"/"linking" feature.

As an example, my MA setup has two providers: self-hosted Navidrome through OpenSubSonic and Tidal. I don't have any music in my Tidal library - it's just used for things I don't own yet. Given that, Tidal is not set to sync artists, albums etc to the MA library, but Navidrome is.

When I search for an artist, I'll not surprisingly end up with a library item and a Tidal item. Here's Agriculture as an example:

If I click into the library item I see a list of the albums I own (that are on Navidrome) and if I click into the Tidal one I see everything the artist has on Tidal (this is a good example because I own one EP not on Tidal and Tidal has an album I don't own - 2 on each). Now, if I hit "Refresh item" in the library item, the library and Tidal item are merged:

The album I don't own appears listed with the albums I do - no duplicates! There's also now a Tidal listing in "Provider details" and when I search for the artist there's only one item. Now though, if I search for one of the albums, I still get the library and Tidal item. Once again though, hitting "refresh item" appears to fix this, but appears to clear the Tidal mapping for the artist forcing me to re-refresh there!

So doing this manually seems to kind of work, but is a little clunky and is going to be a constant bit of work. The docs appear to suggest that this should happen automatically? For example, here and here. This previous discussion seems to suggested that the matching happens lazily (triggered by viewing an item), but that is not what I'm seeing. If it is automatic, it's not explicit when this happens, how often or if it can be manually triggered (for anything other than a single item at a time anyway). So some questions:

• Is this not the case and "automatic" just means "you don't have to manually find the match"?
• Is there a way to trigger matching for the whole library if so?
• If it is meant to be automatic, is there some configuration that I'm missing or something wrong with my installation?

[marcelveldt]

The search is not deduplicated. Merging will only happen when an item is imported into the library.

The global search simply lists everything it can find across all providers and the library

[marcelveldt]

At the time you are doing a global search, it has no idea that the results are potentially the same. The whole matching only happens if you add items to the library.

There used to be a time where we automatically did all cross-provider matching once an item was added to the library but as the project is growing rapidly, that lead to too many api calls across the board so we had to disable that for now. The plan is to at some point have a global metadata cache so we can reinstate this.

[seadowg]

The whole matching only happens if you add items to the library.

This disagrees with your other paragraph, doesn't it? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like matching doesn't happen when an item is added (see below).

There used to be a time where we automatically did all cross-provider matching once an item was added to the library but as the project is growing rapidly, that lead to too many api calls across the board so we had to disable that for now. The plan is to at some point have a global metadata cache so we can reinstate this.

Right, so right now cross provider matching doesn't happen automatically when an item is added to the library - it can only be triggered "manually" if the user hits "Refresh item" or the "Search all providers for matches" button?

[marcelveldt]

This disagrees with your other paragraph, doesn't it? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like matching doesn't happen when an item is added (see below).

If you would also add the Tidal item to the library, they will be auto matched/merged together.
We just do not proactively "pre-match" the results of providers together when an item of one provider/source is added.

[marcelveldt]

Right, so right now cross provider matching doesn't happen automatically when an item is added to the library - it can only be triggered "manually" if the user hits "Refresh item" or the "Search all providers for matches" button?

yes, or simply add the same item from Tidal also to the library, that will also trigger the matching logic.
For now, we can not do the matching in advance due to the resource constraints we have being a open source project with all these local instanced doing a lot of requests to API's. I sure hope this gets fixed in the near future when we have a global ache available.

[seadowg]

Gotcha! That's clear now thanks. I'll have a look at contributing a change to docs around this.