lyrics: Use MusicBrainz artist aliases if default query is not found

[octos]

Use case

I just noticed that the Lyrics plugin fails to fetch lyrics to CHVRCHΞS songs because the artist name contains a Greek uppercase Xi (Ξ), whereas musixmatch.com and lyrics.wikia.com URLs are presumably limited to ASCII characters.

lyrics: failed to fetch: http://lyrics.wikia.com/Chvrch%CE%BEs:Forever (404)
lyrics: failed to fetch: https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Chvrch%CE%BEs/Forever (404)

Solution

One solution would be for the Lyrics plugin to cycle through the artist’s MuzicBrainz aliases if it hits a 404 error.

See also

https://discourse.beets.io/t/asciiized-filenames-for-fetching-lyrics/855

[sampsyo]

Sounds good! It's worth noting that the plugin already does a few things like this for normalizing typography, but using the MB aliases would be a good idea too.

[Moonbase59]

Now that is an interesting example, since I also have a Churches album. I mainly use Picard for tagging, and they have two interesting settings under Options → Metadata:

[x] Translate artist names to this locale when possible
[locale dropdown, I selected English, because I don’t read Japanese or Chinese]
[ ] Use standardized artist names

When I select "Translate", I get "CHVRCHES", when I switch it off, it stays "CHVRCHΞS".
Selecting "Use standardized" seems to change nothing (i.e., it stays "CHVRCHΞS").

Btw, (Album) Artist Sort Order seems always to keep whatever the editor put in "Sort name".

Since Picard is also in Python, it might be worth spelunking in their code to find out how they do it. Might improve compatibility. :-)

[hashhar]

I think the better answer is using the sort fields since MusicBrainz encourages (or maybe enforces, not sure) using only ASCII for the sort fields to improve compatibility. And that is how they handle it in their source code too - they check for a transliteration if available, then fallback to the sort names.

If nobody is currently working on this, I can pick this up after I'm done with #3549.

Off-topic: @Moonbase59 Just in case you were wondering, the "Standardise artist names" means that Artists who get credited with different names on different releases. An example is https://musicbrainz.org/release/1cadc5d0-f4df-4341-aed9-0e33cdc38a72/details which is listed as Release by M.C. Sar & The Real McCoy but it changes to Real McCoy when the config is enabled.

Also, nice to see fellow CHVRCHES fans.