Back in prehistoric times, MusicBrainz used to use an automated script for matching releases to Amazon’s ASINs. But quickly people interjected and demanded to be able to use ARs to associate ASINs to releases. So, we added support for using ARs, but we never got rid of the old system and that has caused a few bugs over time.
I’ve written a script that takes the first step in removing the old amazon ASINs and converts them to AR links. I’ve run this script on my test server musicbrainz.homeip.net — please go to that server and pick your favorite ASIN screw up and let me know if its working.
If this script turns out to work well, I can run it on the main server later this week in order to remove these pesky ASIN issues.
Thanks!
UPDATE: This script has been run on the main server and all Amazon ASINs should now be user editable. No new links have been generated — we’ve only converted old style ASIN matches to ARs so that our editors can make changes.
MetaBrainz Blog 
But how on earth do we find a release with such an ASIN? I’ve fixed all the ones I’ve ever encountered (by adding and cancelling an edit) and they’re very far apart…
Foolip:
Check the link I added to the blog post. It lists the releases that were converted. You can only find these be looking at the DB — the process was all too opaque, which is one of the reasons why we’re ditching it.
I still can’t figure out from this blog post exactly what this new script does. Does it at all show up in the user interface? I went to http://musicbrainz.homeip.net/release/6518fd52-58bf-44a3-8150-00e7c3ffcae5.html to check and found that it had been incorrectly applied (track listing doesn’t match).
I think the track listings should probably be checked algorithmically, as it’s too tiresome for a human to read through and verify.
Foolip, these are all the same ASINs that have been around since forever – the matching script isn’t finding new ones, it’s converting most of the old ones from just ASIN table entries to real Amazon ARs – but with 65k or so of them still left even after we’ve fixed so many of them, there’s no way they could have been re-checked by hand or by machine, this just makes it that much more obvious how to remove them if they’re bad matches.