Normal $matchedtracks is broken in various ways:
1. It now always returns zero. It tries to use the passed metadata to locate the attached file and from that the album and from that the number of matched files. However, I cannot see where the file object is set in metadata.
2. This is really an album-level value - rather than a track or file level value and it should be the same for all tracks or files in an album regardless of whether the file is matched to a track or a track has a file associated with it.
3. It currently requires an argument so you can use $matchedtracks( ) with a space between the brackets, but get an error if you use $matchedtracks(). This is illogical, Captain. We should change this so the function can take 0 or 1 arguments (to avoid backward compatibility issues - or 0 or more arguments).
Anyway, I took a quick look to see if I could fix this quickly, but I can't work out how to fix it.
[PICARD-637] $matchedtracks is broken
The original PR was recommended for merge but also marked as `Further work needed` despite this (though I am unclear what further work is necessary) but due to other commitments I didn't pursue it and it was closed.
I have now rebased this PR and requested that it is reopened in order that it is merged.
Like PICARD-643, I assigned this to you because you're the author of the pull request, nothing more, nothing less.
You may have a misunderstanding about what being assigned to a ticket means here. Perhaps you are thinking of some other workflows where the assignment is passed around to whoever is expected to act next?
Why is this assigned back to me?
I don't think I have anything to add. My PR has been awaiting merge or comment for over a year.
A solution for such a scripting function to be also valid in the tagging script would be to re-run the script whenever a file is matched to a track. I think we had this discussion once, but I don't remember why Picard doesn't do this. Is it too much a performance impact?
As a closing comment...
I am not sure that the functionality of this really hits the spot for me because I can only use it to check whether all tracks have at least one matching file (by comparing it to %_totalalbumtracks%) and I can't use it to find out if the album has duplicated or unmatched music files.
So we might want to create functions $isperfectalbum which uses the same logic as the RemovePerfectAlbums and enables you to use something like e.g. $if($isperfectalbum(),Complete/,FixMe/) at the beginning of your file naming script.
Attempt to revive this and finally get the fix merged: https://github.com/metabrainz/picard/pull/1023