MusicBrainz: An open music encyclopedia (2017)
musicbrainz.org
musicbrainz.org
These strings can also break old car radios in weird ways. Now all japanese artists are any number of utf-8 box characters.
I noticed they have a very extensive set of options for this:
> For example, if “Translate artist names” is enabled with the locale set to “English”, and you enable “Ignore artist name translation” with the scripts set to “Greek (30%)” and “Cyrillic (50%)”, any artist names that contain 30% Greek characters or 50% Cyrillic characters will not be translated and will appear in their origin form.
[1]: https://beets.io
If you look at the Beatles listing they know both when they were released e.g. Abbey Road 1969
https://musicbrainz.org/artist/b10bbbfc-cf9e-42e0-be17-e2c3e...
But also when each and every version was released (20th anniversary etc):
https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/9162580e-5df4-32de-80c...
https://musicbrainz.org/release/d6010be3-98f8-422c-a6c9-787e...
and
https://musicbrainz.org/instrument/0fa6ef90-4c92-4456-9965-a...
But since everyone has their own ideas of what is useful or interesting data, you probably won't get it added to your files by default.
Example, I want to know which instruments are used on The Long And Winding Road, by The Beatles. So I search for the track. But there are no "tracks", there are releases, release groups and recordings. I generally want "the single" or "the album version" (if there's even a difference). If this were an album track that never got released as a single, then I only have recordings (I guess?). The releases page for The Long And Winding Road has hundreds of thousands of entries, so I check the release group: only 4 to choose from! I've hit paydirt: they've all got instruments. Not the same instruments though (two entries say that Billy Preston played the organ, the other two say he played electric piano).
If the track I searched for didn't have a release, I'd have to hope that the recording had the instruments. And this is all inconsistent.
Sidenote: How is this easier than googling the song, clicking the Wikipedia article and reading the (far more interesting) story about the song?
I dunno, perhaps by using fingerprinting I can use the API to identify all releases / recordings of the song that contain instruments, but I have yet to see any implementation that works "well". I'll try de-facto tagging tool, Picard.
Picard had an option to "Use track relationships". This is supposed to grab the type of data I want. So I install Picard, fire it up, and add the whole "Let It Be" album. It thoroughly fucks up my tags adding MusicBrainz IDs, changes the year to 2018, adds the fucking barcode, sets Original Year to 2003 and changes the album name to "Let It Be... Naked". Oh, and it didn't add the instruments.
An I doing it wrong?
It's a free database created by a community for multiple different needs.
Barcodes are very useful way to check you're talking about the same item, similar to isbns for books. Of course many classics either have no ISBN/barcode or lots of them depending on how you look at it, and sometimes you care exactly which one you are talking about and sometime you care about the thing that they are all different versions of. This is a whole fascinating area of library science:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Requirements_for_...
You've not been super specific about what you're trying to achieve but there's almost certainly a chunk of the Musicbrainz community that wants the same thing and has a way of getting it from the interlinked data.
The benefit of doing it in one big super-complicated database is that the interests overlap and so the different needs have synergy, which makes the more obscure details more tractable.
I'll have a quick look at their wiki to see if I can give you pointers.
Also, they link the band's, songs, instruments etc to Wikipedia via wikidata IDs, so of you like reading Wiki text about things, they've got you covered.
You probably want to find a release of that release group that closely matches your files (e.g. is there a "bonus" track, does it have both mono and stereo versions of everything). It's not 100% vital though to get an exact match unless you care about the bonus tracks and other obscurities.
The beatles are an extreme case since there's like a million demo and session versions of each song, which is why its easier to start from a release, which then points to the specific recordings used.
So if you got the files from iTunes and it's the 2009 remaster then it's this one:
https://musicbrainz.org/recording/2df46dec-b453-4444-91b9-5f...
Which then points to a specific recording used (the original studio mix), which was also released as a single and appeared on many different albums, listed here:
https://musicbrainz.org/recording/2df46dec-b453-4444-91b9-5f...
Although that's on lots of different releases (and release groups), if anyone updates the info on that recording, it'll update for all of them.
To get those track level tags you need to choose an option in Picard and there's a couple of 'plugins' for it that let you format the instrument tags in a way you want. It also lets you script the tags if you have something super specific.
Edit: "You probably want to find a release of that release group that closely matches your files". And this is why you can't just point it at your library and let it go. You need to shepherd it at every turn or it'll screw things up. I've used countless auto-taggers over the years (all of which pull from MusicBrainz) and I've never had decent results. These days I tag manually. Most of it's already done, so I just have to handle the new stuff, and sometimes update old stuff (add instruments that 'stand out', update ratings etc).
https://picard-docs.musicbrainz.org/downloads/MusicBrainz_Pi...
> Chapter 7.1 'basic tags'
> The following tags are populated from MusicBrainz data for most releases, without any special Picard settings.
> Note: Some of these tags are only supported for certain file types or tag formats. Please see the Picard Tag Mapping section for details.
Are you using the 'originalyear' value?
> The year of the original release date in the format YYYY. By default this is set to the earliest release in the Release Group. This can provide, for example, the release year of the vinyl version of what you have on CD.
If you have compilations, like film soundtrack and want each track tagged with it's original release date, then you need to tweak things, as noted in the help for the slightly more precise 'originaldate' tag
> This is the same information provided in the _releasegroup_firstreleasedate variable, and is consistent across all tracks in the release. If you prefer to have this tag populated with the date of the earliest recording of the track in the database, which will likely be different for each track in the release, this can be achieved by enabling a one-line tagging script as $set(originaldate,%_recording_firstreleasedate%).
> Be aware that setting this can cause a release to be scattered across multiple directories if you use %originaldate% as part of the path portion of your file naming script.
edit: worth mentioning that Musicbrainz also tracks when things were recorded (i.e. when were the artits in the studio making the music), which is different again from the original release date (when it was made available for sale), so your search term may have been ambigous.