3 ms·

MusicBrainz: An open music encyclopedia (2017)

31 points by ddtaylor 4y ago

raffraffraff 4y ago
I have a lot of music files. Everything is tagged. I have only once used MusicBrains to tag a subset of it, and it thoroughly effed everything up. Some remastered release of a 1972 album? That's 2012 now, and won't show up in your 70s playlist.
- atoav 4y ago
  Also: japanese artists, that released their stuff under a latin name will become japanese now. E.g. Ryoji Ikeda becomes 池田亮司). This is a horror if you can't read japanese and have quite some japanese artists in your collection. These strings can also break old car radios in weird ways. Now all japanese artists are any number of utf-8 box characters.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Just looking up their docs because I was interested in someone else's complaint. 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.
    - atoav 4y ago
      Great thanks for caring <3
- herewulf 4y ago
  I have a lot of music files too. I wanted a nice solution for hand tagging them in Vim where I can work very efficiently. I discovered beets[1] which uses MusicBrainz. I soon figured out that it was easier to use autotagging. The trick is that you can't do it blindly. You have to check the tagging (which beets makes easy in timid mode). I've caught lots of errors and then corrected them on MusicBrainz. I'm helping other people out with the same (frequently esoteric music) and still spending less time than typing in a tracklist from the back of a CD jewel case or from Bandcamp. [1]: https://beets.io https://beets.io
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  I think this is an issue with either the tool you used or your config. 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-e2c3e1d2600d 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-80cc-f45a8d8a9b1d https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/9162580e-5df4-32de-80c...
  - raffraffraff 4y ago
    Ya see, that page is the exact reason why I don't use MusicBrainz: I don't really care about the label, country, format, codes etc. I want the artist, album, year and song title (all of which I have). If a data source could tag the instruments used on each track, I'd pay good money for that. But that doesn't seem to exist, which is why I just tag my own tracks.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      Your wish is granted: https://musicbrainz.org/release/d6010be3-98f8-422c-a6c9-787e2e491e58 https://musicbrainz.org/release/d6010be3-98f8-422c-a6c9-787e... and https://musicbrainz.org/instrument/0fa6ef90-4c92-4456-9965-ad3f96c51db3/recordings 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.
      - raffraffraff 4y ago
        Ok, I really, really wanted to be proven wrong here because I want this more than I can describe, but ... It's just completely unusable. 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?
- saaaaaam 4y ago
  I’m really surprised to hear this. Did you use Picard to do the tagging or something else? If Picard I suggest you email Rob and the rest of the team with details as this is entirely contrary to what Musicbrainz normally does and they’d almost certainly want to dig into what has happened.
IThoughtYouGNU 4y ago

31 points by ddtaylor 4y ago

I have a lot of music files. Everything is tagged. I have only once used MusicBrains to tag a subset of it, and it thoroughly effed everything up. Some remastered release of a 1972 album? That's 2012 now, and won't show up in your 70s playlist.

atoav 4y ago
Also: japanese artists, that released their stuff under a latin name will become japanese now. E.g. Ryoji Ikeda becomes 池田亮司). This is a horror if you can't read japanese and have quite some japanese artists in your collection. These strings can also break old car radios in weird ways. Now all japanese artists are any number of utf-8 box characters.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Just looking up their docs because I was interested in someone else's complaint. 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.
  - atoav 4y ago
    Great thanks for caring <3
herewulf 4y ago
I have a lot of music files too. I wanted a nice solution for hand tagging them in Vim where I can work very efficiently. I discovered beets[1] which uses MusicBrainz. I soon figured out that it was easier to use autotagging. The trick is that you can't do it blindly. You have to check the tagging (which beets makes easy in timid mode). I've caught lots of errors and then corrected them on MusicBrainz. I'm helping other people out with the same (frequently esoteric music) and still spending less time than typing in a tracklist from the back of a CD jewel case or from Bandcamp. [1]: https://beets.io https://beets.io
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I think this is an issue with either the tool you used or your config. 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-e2c3e1d2600d 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-80cc-f45a8d8a9b1d https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/9162580e-5df4-32de-80c...
- raffraffraff 4y ago
  Ya see, that page is the exact reason why I don't use MusicBrainz: I don't really care about the label, country, format, codes etc. I want the artist, album, year and song title (all of which I have). If a data source could tag the instruments used on each track, I'd pay good money for that. But that doesn't seem to exist, which is why I just tag my own tracks.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Your wish is granted: https://musicbrainz.org/release/d6010be3-98f8-422c-a6c9-787e2e491e58 https://musicbrainz.org/release/d6010be3-98f8-422c-a6c9-787e... and https://musicbrainz.org/instrument/0fa6ef90-4c92-4456-9965-ad3f96c51db3/recordings 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.
    - raffraffraff 4y ago
      Ok, I really, really wanted to be proven wrong here because I want this more than I can describe, but ... It's just completely unusable. 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?
saaaaaam 4y ago
I’m really surprised to hear this. Did you use Picard to do the tagging or something else? If Picard I suggest you email Rob and the rest of the team with details as this is entirely contrary to what Musicbrainz normally does and they’d almost certainly want to dig into what has happened.

IThoughtYouGNU 4y ago