If this is what I get with a simple query, a bit more automatable work would get the info into a format that Roon or Yate or Songkong or Bliss could read. I’ll bet Roon could hook into the ChatGPT api and automatically retrieve at least some of the metadata for a given album in at least some cases.
Talking to chatgpt4:
Q:
Please show me complete metadata for the Dave Douglas album “Gifts”
A:
Dave Douglas’ album “Gifts,” released on April 12, 2024, is a celebration of the blessings of life and music, reflecting on shared human experiences and the importance of musical heritage. The album features a mix of original compositions by Douglas and interpretations of Billy Strayhorn classics.
Are you talking about MusicBrainz website or the MusicBrainz Picard tagger?
Picard is certainly very confusing but I consider MusicBrainz website pretty logical and straightforward apart from a few anomolies with Classical. If you use use a userscript such as the Discogs then all you have to do is find the release on Discogs, select the Add Release button, give it a quick check and then submit the release.
Doesn’t this all rely on well meaning people submitting accurate, typo free information?
Given that the database of music must grow every week, quite substantially, what are people hoping for?
I’m just curious on what people hope to achieve.
Doesn’t wrong information on streaming services contribute to the problem?
Yes, I mean the MusicBrainz website. Cannot follow it at all.
I regularly use Discogs to manually complete poorly tagged and unidentified albums in roon. I had no idea there was script that could upload to MusicBrainz. After 7 years or so I would have tagged many thousands of poorly tagged releases now visible only to me.
Yes there are scripts for Discogs and all kind of sites.
Also, I have a combined database of MusicBrainz and Discogs that is optimized for using with SongKong at Albunack As part of that you can browse an artist with their Discogs and MusicBrainz releases on one page and can easily import Discogs releases into MusicBrainz
Interesting experiment, however doing it this way for lots of albums would be very slow, and I expect there are restrictions on how many calls you can make to ChatGPT, also you would want to receive the data in a structured way (maybe possible I havent looked into ChatGPT much) rather than natural language for processing.
Three great things about MusicBrainz that make it better than other Music databases:
The data is stored in a proper relational database, so that Releases, Tracks, Artists, Works, Recordings are all entities and can be linked to each other in different ways whereas the alternatives simply have Releases and Artists. For example in MusicBrainz you can see all the releases a particular version of a recording is on, in alternative databases you cannot do that because they just have tracks that are part of a particular release.
Difficult edge cases are considered and solutions found not ignored. For example if Roon only used MusicBrainz and not AllMusic the problems with artists with the same name would be resolved because MusicBrainz has a disambuguation field that is used to distinguish between multiple artists with the same name.
Its open source, freely downloadable and freely editable and subject to voting. Anyone can edit it but it is subject to voting by others to stop dross getting in, or if it does get in it gets removed quite quickly. Others can build on the work you done, for example you add a release with the basic information and the others can add performer credits at later date.
In Jaikoz you can select multiple files to and submit them to MusicBrainz as a new release, this opens the MusicBrainz Add New Release webpage with the data prefilled so you just have to check details look correct and then submit as a new release.
However you have to do this one album at a time, you cannot mass submit multiple albums at once automatically because MusicBrainz does not allow this.
Would this be useful, or were you hoping for a way to automatically add all missing releases in one go?
the Album by album approach from inside Songkong would be very usefull.
I’m looking for an easy way to feed Musicbrainz with missing releases.
As you can just scrape discogs info into your local files, and if you should then submit these as new releases, i’m hoping to get rid of the unidentified count in Roon.
As long as the albums are not odd genres and rare releases i find Roon manages quite well.
One area i keep harping on about is extracting pseudo albums from box sets . Take big box and pretend that its a collection of previously released albums. This often fails.
It certainly accounts for most of my non id albums but i have around 70 out of thousands
I find Roon doesn’t do a good job at CD singles, especially promo CD singles where the track listing is different than the retail version or from a different country than what it pulls the data from. A USA and UK single might have different tracks. Or Roon only shows possible match from a vinyl version, etc. I know it’s not all Roon’s fault. It has gotten better so more metadata must be getting uploaded to the databases it uses. Pulling the metadata from Discogs would solve a lot of those problems.
I guess this qualifies as a non-standard release and I would not really expect roon to have metadata ready for such rare releases.
Even if the track order of a particular promo single is not known to roon, it is possible to identify it manually as the standard release and manually sort the tracks, is it not? Have not that much of experience neither with promos nor singles but in all cases I have tried it worked flawlessly even if some bonus tracks are completely unknown in all versions roon has to offer. After identifying with re-sorted track order roon seems to represent the one in the files so you would not even notice the difference.
Would say 70 is nothing.
Question is why identifying parts of a boxset as the original release fails regularly. It might mean some manual track order work, extracting tracks from an album or renumbering some discs but it usually works according to my experience.
As a DJ I have loads of electronic vinyl ep rips (including lots of white labels) from early 90s and promo cds for instance which are indeed very often not identified, or even after manual searching only sometimes give 1 specific version of a vinyl release which differs from the white label release.
all these are perfectly found in Discogs…
I would say Roon, MusicBrainz and All Music are biased towards albums.
Discogs is good for singles because they often very collectible, and earlitest releases by artists are going to be singles not albums
Especially in classical boxes DG Decca etc are issuing back catalogue which in many cases was vinyl so LP maybe 50 mins max so they pad them out to a full 75 min CD . Hence the CD is not a previous release . It’s very common
Also in re copying a CD the track lengths may add the odd second or 2 so they don’t match.
Even things like the “original jacket” series can fail when they are by definition a simple collection of individual CD. Rock boxes tend to be collections of old CD so are easily splittable.
Certainly true but I do not expect Discogs to be used as a metadata source for roon directly at any time soon. One reason being metadata related to personnel is an outright mess in discogs and I would expect structured data as well as links to be mostly unusable for a software like roon. (And I have enough ghost entries with first name ´Composer´ or ´1813-1883´ in my list of composers causing me a headache).
I agree, and not only with classical boxsets. Several labels specializing in reissues are packing 2 LPs or 1.5 on a CD, doing a compilation from old releases or alike. Nevertheless if the original release is existing somewhere in MB or TiVo, it is doable to cut out the original tracks and renumber them. It is certainly work and might sometimes leave a torso of a boxset with a few tracks not having their original release.
As an example I recently cut some Pentatone re-releases containing stuff from 2 LPs into pieces matching their original DGG releases. In this case Rodrigo´s ´Concerto de Aranjuez´ from the release containing concerto madrigal by the same composer:
I guess this depends on the genre. For electronic music the Metadata for contributing artists is superb in discogs imo.
Stuff like feat other artists or who helped producing tracks are in my case all very useful info from discogs
So now I’m using the user scripts and albunack to feed musicbrain missing entries.
Then using songkong again to tag as much as possible to see if roon then identifies these.
I absolutely agree, same is true to many niche genres which attract a lot of collectors and have a loyal fanbase (such as progrock) and of course mainstream rock and pop and contemporary jazz.
Did not mean to say the tags themselves are bad. But it gets pretty complicated when it comes to linking personnel links correctly as several composers exist manyfold or are not linked to their profile. That is for sure a problem for software like roon depending on structured data not just only tags. I have tagged a lot of albums using discogs and result in roon is problematic.
Really messy are jazz and classical recordings from the analogue era in discogs. In many cases people seemingly have copied tags from the record label so composer´s names got mixed up, surname of a composer is treated like the first name of another composer, and alike.
He exists as a split personality in my roon library 8 times solely under his correct name just out of 17 albums not to mention the hundreds of variants mixed with orchestras or soloists he collaborated with. I guess most of this metagarbage originated from discogs (which I used for tagging as a default source for some time) and roon obviously was not capable of recognizing all entries despite the identical names.
Is there any reason you are merging these compound artists rather than splitting/delimiting them? Metadata sources including discogs are littered with them as in all your examples. The long Classical examples are clear but so too are your soul music examples. For example Billy Griffen and Pete Moore co-wrote as did Don Davis, Harvey Scales & Melvin Griffin
By default roon uses a semi-colon to delimit artists/composers but you can add others in settings for example the hyphen in your Colin Davis example. Depending on your genres you may even want to add a comma delimiter as in your Alte Musik Berlin example. Personally I haven’t added a comma delimiter as that will cause more problems than it solves with Classical artist names which often have a comma. Mp3tag can batch replace delimiters across your entire library in a few clicks. There will still be a requirement to manually equivalence/merge artists and I find myself doing it all the time but not thousands as the vast majority of these compound artist cases can be taken care of with delimiters.
