beetbox / beetbox/beets

New importer UI displays canonical artist name instead of artist credit (even when `artist_credit` is enabled)

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#5,010 6 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
bug
Dominant language
Python
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Description

### Problem

I'm trying to import the album [Surf by Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment](https://beta.musicbrainz.org/release-group/829d8a22-367c-477d-8ea4-4b831ed4eca3). For some reason beets wants to change one of the artist names from the alias to the canonical name (Donnie Trumpet -> Nico Segal), even though there is no release with that credit. This has always worked fine for me with single artists, maybe the issue is with the combination of multiple artists (plus join phrases) and aliases? I can't think of another release which has both right now, but I'll try to find something and see if that runs into the same problem.

Edit: Picard fetches the name properly, so it doesn't seem to be a problem on MB's end.

Edit 2: The issue doesn't seem to be present in the packaged version, only in Git builds.

```
Match (97.6%):
Nico Segal & The Social Experiment - Surf
≠ artist
MusicBrainz, Digital Media, 2015, XW, None, None, None
https://musicbrainz.org/release/2f536a6a-ffbe-4396-a6a5-098302d6c4d0
≠ Artist: Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment -> Nico Segal & The Social Experiment
* Album: Surf
* (#1) Miracle (4:10)
* (#2) Slip Slide (3:59)
* (#3) Warm Enough (3:21)
* (#4) Nothing Came to Me (3:30)
* (#5) Wanna Be Cool (3:27)
* (#6) Windows (3:56)
* (#7) Caretaker (1:35)
* (#8) Just Wait (3:47)
* (#9) Familiar (3:53)
* (#10) SmthnthtIwnt (1:51)
* (#11) Go (4:22)
* (#12) Questions (1:54)
* (#13) Something Came to Me (3:10)
* (#14) Rememory (2:34)
* (#15) Sunday Candy (3:46)
* (#16) Pass the Vibes (2:30)
➜ [A]pply, More candidates, Skip, Use as-is, as Tracks, Group albums,
Enter search, enter Id, aBort?
```

### Setup

* OS: Arch Linux
* Python/beets versions:
```
beets version 1.6.1
Python version 3.11.6
plugins: badfiles, chroma, copyartifacts, embedart, fetchart, inline, lyrics, mbsubmit, mbsync, missing, mpdupdate, thumbnails, types, unimported
```
* Turning off plugins made problem go away (yes/no): no

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

No file or test is named. Start by reproducing the new importer UI flow for the Surf release with artist_credit enabled, using the linked MusicBrainz release and the displayed mismatch as the reference. Done means the importer preserves “Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment” and its join phrase instead of replacing the credited name with “Nico Segal,” while packaged builds remain unaffected.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
cli
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
45/100

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