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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 kno

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?

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Yes, almost certainly. 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_Bibliographic_Records 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.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  So, what you call "an album" or "single" is a release group, because there multiple re-issues of beatles albums, in mono, stereo, red vinyl etc. each of which is a release. They often but not always share the same recordings e.g. the US release may replace an album track with the single version or re-order tracks. 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-b453-4444-91b9-5fa5d7515fd9 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-b453-4444-91b9-5fa5d7515fd9 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.
  - raffraffraff 4y ago
    I picked The Beatles because it's "hard", but also because it's the most likely candidate to have all of the metadata populated (including instruments). And it's a perfect example of why a gigantic database that tries too hard to please the 'train spotters' with catalog numbers and barcodes, is not suitable for someone who has the album version of a song and just wants to tag it. What normal person knows/cares what a release group is? 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).

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Yes, almost certainly. 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_Bibliographic_Records 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.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
So, what you call "an album" or "single" is a release group, because there multiple re-issues of beatles albums, in mono, stereo, red vinyl etc. each of which is a release. They often but not always share the same recordings e.g. the US release may replace an album track with the single version or re-order tracks. 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-b453-4444-91b9-5fa5d7515fd9 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-b453-4444-91b9-5fa5d7515fd9 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.
- raffraffraff 4y ago
  I picked The Beatles because it's "hard", but also because it's the most likely candidate to have all of the metadata populated (including instruments). And it's a perfect example of why a gigantic database that tries too hard to please the 'train spotters' with catalog numbers and barcodes, is not suitable for someone who has the album version of a song and just wants to tag it. What normal person knows/cares what a release group is? 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).