I search Discogs on artist and/or album name. If the alias name doesn't work it is not being recognized by the search exposed through the API. There is no way to explicitly search on an alias so I can't even implement a 'back off' algorithm.

Okay, I'll look at this. It would require a standard field to store the alias or alternate name.

I've done some additional testing and I don't think this can work unless you manually supply the 'common' name.

If I do a query on 'NPhonix' limited to artists I get two results. One for 'N-Phonix' and one for 'Triamer'. Even if I get ambitious and load the artist page for the 'N-Phonix' return it still wouldn't work because 'NPhonix' is not listed as an alias on that page. The only alias mentioned is 'Fedor Stepanenko' which is his real name. I could always simply use the first return but that is overtly data dependent.

If you supply a 'common' name I can use that when performing the search.

So the choices are:

1) on no matches do an artist query and use the first returned value, if any, as the artist. (questionable because the artist may be perfectly valid and the album is incorrect).

2) manually supply a 'common' name and use that. This seems somewhat redundant as you could always do it manually the first time you activate the Discogs wizard for an album. Once the album has a release ID it would not be used again.

3) think about it some more and leave it alone for now 🙂