Fixing unmatched or wrongly-matched tracks
Everything match-related lives on the MusicBrainz page. Along the top you'll see the running totals for your library: matched, needs attention, pending (queued, still being worked through), manual (matches you set yourself) and to review. While the background worker is busy, a progress bar shows what it's doing right now.
Needs Attention: the unresolved queue
Tracks the matcher couldn't confidently resolve gather in Needs Attention, in three tabs:
- Unmatched, tracks that found no acceptable MusicBrainz recording, plus Apple Music rows still missing their artist. Each row has an input where you can supply or correct the artist; as you fix rows they save instantly in the background, and drafts you haven't submitted survive leaving the page.
- Paused, rows you've parked. Pausing tells the matcher to stop retrying for now, without deciding anything.
- Archived, rows you've dismissed indefinitely. Good for the genuinely unmatchable: white-noise apps, self-recorded voice memos, that podcast that snuck into a music export. Unarchive any time to requeue them.
Retry all, at the top of the MusicBrainz page, requeues your entire unresolved queue for another pass (useful after you've fixed a batch of artists). The Pause all and Archive all buttons within each tab only act on the rows currently on screen, so with a long list you may need to page through and run them more than once. Rows for songs played on Apple Music radio carry an "Apple Radio" badge, since station plays are the most common source of artist-less rows.
You rarely need Retry: unresolved tracks are retried automatically on a backoff schedule, and anything you've listened to recently jumps the queue, a stuck track you played this week gets re-attempted within minutes, not days.
The review queue: near-misses
When the matcher finds a candidate that's close but not certain, title similarity high but imperfect, or a live/acoustic variant where the wrong pick would be misleading, it doesn't guess. The candidate lands in To review with the proposed recording alongside your track's name. You confirm or reject each one; a rejection is remembered, so the same wrong candidate is never proposed again, and the track goes back into the queue for a fresh attempt.
Correcting a match that's already been made
On rare occasions, a tricky case like a same-titled song or a compilation credit slips through wrong. Two places to fix it:
- Recently Matched (linked from the MusicBrainz page) lists everything settled in the last 30 days, so you can eyeball a fresh import's matches and correct any that look off.
- Any track's detail page, open the track from your library or search, and its current match is shown with an edit control, however long ago it was matched.
The match editor works the same in both: it shows you candidate recordings from MusicBrainz to pick from, and failing that you can paste a recording MBID directly, find the right recording on musicbrainz.org, copy its ID, paste. Manual matches are marked as such and never overwritten by the automatic matcher.
Fix once, fixed everywhere
Corrections aren't cosmetic. Setting the right artist on a pending row graduates every play of that song into your real history; fixing a wrong recording updates your play counts, pulls the correct album art, and feeds the right genre into your stats. And because matches are shared library-wide, one fix covers every play of that track, past and future, including new plays arriving from live tracking or Plex.
A realistic expectation: after a big first import, expect the matcher to get your library into the high nineties by percentage on its own, then spend a coffee break in Needs Attention on the long tail. It's oddly satisfying work, and it only ever needs doing once.